


Red Moon Rising

by matrixrefugee



Category: Yami No Matsuei
Genre: Coming of Age, Energy Vampirism, F/M, M/M, Vampires, back story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-12
Updated: 2011-10-13
Packaged: 2017-10-24 13:47:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/264143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Ministry of Hades searches the home of Kazutaka Muraki, they find a manuscript of their most notorious fugitive's memoirs, in which he describes his troubled youth and his awakening as an energy vampire...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. New Moon: Birth, Childhood and Adolescence

“Red Moon Rising”

By “Matrix Refugee”

 _Note: When the Ministry of Hades obtained a search warrant for the house of Dr. Kazutaka Muraki, they found these typed notes for a memoir in a drawer of the study._

Some would say that a story like mine should never need to be told, and I would agree that some parts should not have had to happen, much less be committed to paper and so to immortality, as long as the narrative exists to be read. But the events that played out are, in many ways, no more novel or peculiar than most, nothing new under the sun or the moon: men and women for generations have told of their joys, their triumphs and their tragedies: only the particulars and the way in which they are arranged make these tales of light and shadow any different from one another.

It is said that each one of us is the product of a tribe, the next phase of each family’s bloodline as it continues to evolve through time and space. Fifteen generations back, my ancestor Murasaki Yukio emerged as an herbalist and a field surgeon during the Shimabara Rebellion of 1638 during the Tokugawa Era. A samurai, Kenjin no Okami, took him into his service as a personal physician and confidante. Later on, when Kenjin disgraced his master by taking part in an assassination plot, Yukio served as his second when Kenjin was obliged to take his own life in an act of ritual suicide, though there is evidence that Yukio may have been the one to alert his master’s master to the samurai’s culpability. It is sometimes said that Yukio bought his life as a free man with the blood of his own master, changing his last name to Muraki, and for this reason, despite the success of the family, that a shadow has hung over the family. The men of the family, particularly the first born, seem to possess a kind of pragmatic cruelty. Not that they are sadists who rejoice in the suffering of those who go under their surgical knives, but that they have a clear understanding that there are times when pain must be added on top of pain before relief can be achieved and the process of healing started.

In the middle of the Meiji period, my great-grandfather, Naritaka, was among the first to readopt and openly practice Western medicine once Admiral Matthew Perry of the American Navy encouraged the “Land of the Rising Sun” to reopen trade and commerce with the Western world. Michitaka helped to dispel the fears that the “white devils” would corrupt the land and bring plague upon the people. When the first pharmaceutical companies were founded in Japan, he invested in them, laying the foundation for the family fortune. Ours had been a prosperous family, but he expanded our fortunes, building a Georgian mansion on the edge of a village comprised of traditional one and two-storey houses of wood and bamboo.

His elder son, my grandfather Yukitaka, the “grand old man” of the family, would later convert a wing of the mansion vacated when his brother Ashitaka relocated to the American west, into a private clinic, But the shadow that hovered over the family collected about him: It was rumored that some of his privately treated patients showed unusual abilities, and his contacts with the government included suspicious medical experiments involving prisoners of war during the war of expansion during the 1940s.

My father, Michitaka, grew up in the shadow of this. Perhaps that was what lead him, as a fairly young man, to embrace Christianity and to be baptized into the Catholic Church. He took the name Xavier after the Jesuit missionary who brought the Gospel to Japan in the 1500s, but most people continued to address him as Michitaka. While my grandfather was a charismatic man with an affable demeanor and a gently cruel smile -- some folk compared him to the American actor Vincent Price -- my father seemed more diffident, even awkward in a boyish way, but he had a charm about him that delighted his female patients and it was likely that charm which lead some to have an affair of the flesh with him. But there were likely other reasons for his philandering.

In the summer of 1945, my father had gone to Nagasaki to visit relatives who lived in a village outside the city limits. One morning in August, Michitaka and his cousins were supposed to go into the city, but one of them had come down with food poisoning, which obliged them to stay at home.

It was just as well, for of a sudden, the sky turned black as coal and a strong, hot wind arose. At the time, they thought it was a strange freak storm, but the news soon came that the Americans had struck the city with a strange new bomb that had obliterated part of the city, leaving people as shadows on the ground. And the survivors were horribly burned. Others were unscathed, but later developed cancer.

My father was, for this reason, considered one of the _hibakusha_ , that class of survivors who were openly pitied but privately feared. Girls would date him in college, but any talk of marriage from my father lead to quiet, polite refusals, or with the girl’s family refusing to let Michitaka continue to court her. Perhaps that is why he turned promiscuous, medicating himself with the female patients who developed crushes on him. Perhaps that is why he married my mother, the woman without a past, who did not care where he had come from and who accepted his attentions ravenously.

After the war and after my father had qualified for his license, my grandfather retired from his practice, going back to his hobby of collecting books and to maintaining the family’s finances. My father took up his father’s practice, but I sometimes suspected that he did so out of a sense of duty rather than out of personal choice. Even still, he was not above carrying on shamelessly with some of his own patients

Generally, my grandfather turned a blind eye to my father’s affairs de coeur, but he insisted that, at some point, my father settled down and fathered a son to carry on the family name and inherit the estate. The last thing he wanted to see was one of our American cousins inheriting the family fortune.

At length, in the winter of 1959, the two of them, father and son, took a working vacation as the house physicians at a busy ski resort and hot spring in the mountains. The female clientele were delighted to have a pair of fine and handsome physicians at their service and my father looked on this as a chance to expand his conquests. However, my grandfather had other ideas, and on one afternoon, he took my father on a long hike through the hills, to counsel him that it was time that he gave up the philandering and took a wife. They did not have long to discuss the matter, for something cut the conversation short. A painful moan rose from a shallow, snowy ravine beside the path. My father, the younger and more agile of the two, clambered down the embankment to find the cause of the cry, while my grandfather hurried back to the lodge for help.

The victim proved to be a young woman, clad in a loose white yukata, her skin almost as pale as the snow and her silvery-white hair fallen over her face. Her cat-like eyes were a steely shade of grey. Hypothermia had set in and she barely kept conscious as my father examined her. My father wrapped her in his overcoat and carried her back up the embankment.

The lodge keeper allowed the girl a private room while my father and grandfather tended her. Once she regained consciousness, they discovered that she spoke no language but a strange tongue which, to my grandfather’s keen ears, sounded like a strange form of Hebrew. They had to communicate with her by signs, telling her that she was in a safe place. She grew agitated, but my father spoke to her gently, managing to calm her down and quell her fears. She seemed to have no recollection of who she was and where she had come from. But over the days that followed, she picked up a rudimentary use of Japanese.

The servants at the lodge, however, were wary of the new guests. The older ones from the smaller villages whispered among themselves that the younger Doctor Muraki had brought in a yuki-onna, a snow-white creature like a vampire, which appeared to stranded travelers and sucked the warmth and life from them. My father, educated man that he was, brushed off these rumors as mere peasant’s tales.

The girl showed especial fondness for her rescuer, her pale face lighting up whenever my father approached her. Once she was up and about, she kept close to him, like a pale shadow trailing his heels. She would have sat beside him as he tended to his patients, but he gently refused her.

My grandfather called on some connections of his in law enforcement, looking for information on any missing women whose descriptions matched that of the girl in the ditch. But though there were reports of women who had gone missing in the same valley, none of them resembled the pale waif.

My father decided to take her into the family home and, like a kinder, gentler Henry Higgins, decided to make a lady of her. She took the name Yukiko, for lack of a better name, and there could not be a better one for her, since she spelled it with the kanji for “snow” and “child”. Truly she was a child of the snow. My father doted on her, taking her about the city, bringing her to the theatre and museums, dressing her in fine clothes. She was, as it were, a living doll to him, and though she absorbed knowledge like a sponge absorbs water, her grey eyes had the vapid expression that many dolls have.

I do not use the metaphor of a doll lightly, for it was not long before Yukiko took an interest in dolls, after attending a doll festival. She soon started to collect antique porcelain dolls, filling shelf after shelf with the little figures, spending hours brushing their hair with a wig brush and arranging their outfits. She favored French and German models, and found ways to inveigle them from antique dealers with connections. She even took to wearing ornate Victorian-style gowns in dark colors, predating the “Gothic Lolita” style by about thirty years.

At length, about two years after she came to live with my father, Yukiko was found to be with child. My grandfather was reticent about the prospect of the two of them marrying, but my father did not want his child to be born out of wedlock. Despite the hurry, theirs was still a lavish wedding, but the guests still concealed furtive whispers behind their compliments. People questioned my father’s judgment in marrying an unknown woman with no family to speak of.

However, seven months later, her first child entered the world stillborn. A few months later, the couple tried again to conceive, and within another three months, Yukiko was expecting again. But this time, in her fifth month, she miscarried, the ordeal bringing her to the brink of death. This time, they waited a year before attempting to conceive again: this time, Yukiko gave birth to a daughter. However, within three month, the child died of a condition known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Michitaka despaired of fathering an heir, and in his state, he turned to his work for solace.My mother seemed incapable of sustaining a pregnancy: in four years, she had lost three children. And each time she came away more distraught than before. Perhaps this is why my father despaired and started to seek comfort among his female patients again. And in so doing, he backslid into another ill-advised dalliance with one of his patients. But in her own sorrows, Yukiko was not about to give up so easily.

I calculated that my conception may have taken place about the time that the cherry blossoms would have bloomed in late March. When I was younger and more innocent, I imagined that it could have taken place in a romantic setting, in the shade of a cherry tree, at sunset after a flower-viewing party. But no doubt my mother already knew of my father's infidelities and my father might have been seeking to prove to her that he still loved her.

This time, despite her three previous failures, Yukiko’s health was stable: she seemed more at ease in her pregnancy. My father, however, was in a daze, for reasons he refused to disclose. But Yukitaka had his ways of finding out the truth: his son had started a family with a former patient whom he had treated for peritonitis following a ruptured appendix.

It snowed intermittently the night that I was born. My father had a patient to tend to (so he claimed) and so my grandfather oversaw my birth. My mother's travails lasted well into the night, until at midnight, my grandfather drew into the world a small, pale, male child, as frail-looking as a snowflake. At that moment, the moon went behind a cloud, and when it emerged, the face of the moon had turned the color of blood in an old wound. My grandfather claimed that I stirred in his arms, opened my eyes -- violet at that time, though they would darken to a medium grey in my teens and lighten again to silver when I was older -- stretching my own tiny limbs toward the red moon.

Years later, I would learn just why my father had not attended my birth:

The morning that preceded the night that I was born, his former patient Mineko Shidou, whom he had treated for a ruptured appendix, had given birth to a son. Because he was born earlier in the day, by all legal intents, Saki was my father’s elder son. When my father finally deigned to see the son which his wife had borne him, he declared me so sickly-looking that he doubted I would live to see the new year, and so he had me baptized in case I died.

Later, when I was an adult, I saw the pictures that my father had taken of the son, a rosy, healthy child, so unlike the pale, spindly freak with the eyes like a cat or a reptile who had been borne in wedlock. But there were few of me on the shelf in his office.

Childbirth left my mother in a weakened state, and so my grandfather sent for a wetnurse to suckle me while my mother recovered. I practically hibernated with the nurse, for that winter came on fiercely, with days of cold and frequent snowfall. For how much the nurse fed me, I should have grown strong, but I continued to be fragile-looking and thin, as if I was not of this world.

I would always be a somewhat spindly child: well into adolescence, no matter how much I ate, I looked as thin as a chopstick, even with the industrial-sized bento boxes that were sent with me to school. This was a harbinger of things to come.

Thoughts of my childhood brings memories of sunlit days spent under canopies which my mother ordered erected in the garden. I was not allowed to go beyond their shade for any great length of time. And even on the warmest days, I wore long sleeved shirts. The rest of the time, she kept me indoors, out of the light. This did not trouble me: I was a quiet, bookish child, who enjoyed nothing more than curling up with a book, a favorite plush toy by my side for company. My father tried to get me to be more athletic. And while I would later take up martial arts training in junior high school, I was generally to be found reading one of the classics or leafing through one of my grandfather’s medical texts, as soon as I was strong enough to pick them up.

Due to my seemingly delicate constitution, my grandfather decided it was better that I was taught at home, at least until I started to “grow into myself”. He indulged my bookishness, letting me loose in his library. If my heritage did not demand that I would one day be a physician and shoulder my father’s practice, I would have become a poet or a novelist. With the covers of a book for a portal, I wandered the woods of Narnia and plunged into the mines of Moria, guarding the Lord of the Rings. I explored Crusoe’s island and sailed with Sinbad the sailor. I wept happy tear as Oliver Twist found his true family, and quivered at the monsters in my own backyard that Lafcadio Hearn had outlined. I read the tales of the Kojiki and the lives of the saints. I was beyond bright: it seemed I was at genius level in intelligence. When I was ten, I decided that if I had had a choice, I would have been born during the halcyon days of the Heian Era. My grandfather chuckled at this and hinted that it might mean that I had once lived in that time, but my father, staunch Christian that he was, rebuked my grandfathe for “filling the boy’s head with such false notions”.

In some ways, Yukitaka was more of a father to me than his own son who’d sired me: He saw to my education and my healthcare, and it was he who noticed that signs of abuse that began to turn up.

The winter that I turned seven, things started to change: the warm darkness that I dwelled in started to turn cold, as it might be for a soon-to-be delivered child, if the mother has died before its birth. A chilling metaphor, but a fitting one.

Not until years later did I learn to reasons for my mother’s alternating bouts of hysteria and smothering affection and jealousy, but at the time, I was a child at her mercy.

It isn’t unusual for a child to share their parent’s hobbies while they are small and still finding their own pleasures. At that age, the dolls that my mother collected fascinated me. Always a cautious child, I handled the little bisque and porcelain creatures delicately, even reverently.

My father cringed at the interest I took the doll collection, saying that his son was not even a boy. But his own father knew better, and when the next shipment of boxes came for my mother, a box arrived with my name on it. Within were a lovely French doll in a purple riding costume and, since I had grown fond of E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”, a rather lumpy Nutcracker.

My mother eyed the dolls with a cool sort of envy and at the time, because she said nothing about it, I thought nothing of it. The two poppets were soon my constant companions: the French doll I named Veronica, since I liked the sound of the name, while the Nutcracker remained simply Nutcracker.

Or at least they were my constant companion, in the waning days of my innocence.

I was too young to know what triggered it, or why it started, but I noticed my mother started to act strangely, even jealous. A kitten that I had adopted from a litter which our gardener had found in a disused stable on the grounds suddenly “ran away”. My plush animals vanished, supposedly given away to children of poor families.

One day, I searched the house, looking for Veronica and Nutcracker, not finding them in any of the rooms I frequented. At length, I asked my mother, “Where’s Veronica? Where’s Nutcracker? You didn’t…” The thought came to me that she had a hand in their disappearance. To an adult, this separation might seem silly, but to a child of seven with few companions, this constitutes nothing less than a tragedy.

My mother knelt before me, cupping my cheeks in her black lace half-gloved hands. “Kazutaka, you’re the pride of my collection,” she crooned, her eyes narrowed like those of a predatory creature or of a sorceress in a faery tale. She leaned in and kissed my forehead, as if she had marked me with a seal or a scent.

I had no one to flee to for solace: my father was busy with his patients and my grandfather had gone away on a long trip for his health. That left me alone with this evil enchantress who had taken on the form of my mother.

Some weeks after the incident of the missing dolls, it started on a weekend when I did not have my regular studies. My mother called me to her room, telling it I had to take my medicine. I was prone to calcium and Vitamin D deficiencies, due to being kept out of bright sunlight so much, and so my grandfather was accustomed to administer intravenous drips of vitamins to me at regular intervals, usually once a week.

This time, however, my grandfather was away on a long trip, and so my mother was the one administering the medicine. But while the drip of vitamins usually left me feeling stronger and more alert, I started to feel tired the moment the drip started to flow into my vein. Not only tired, but I soon realized I could not move a finger, my limbs rendered as stiff as a doll’s. My mother, smiling in a way that made my soul quiver, leaned over me and picking me up, cradled me to her bosom. “You’re all mine, Kazutaka, the pride of my collection,” she murmured. She rose and carried me through the corridors of her suite, singing to me an odd little lullaby, not a reassuring melody, but a creepy little ditty that would keep any child awake, but to a child alert and immobile in his mother’s arms, it was a nightmare.

This went on for days, with her feeding me intravenously and dosing me again every time that the drugs started to wear off. In those few days, she treated me exactly as if I were one of her dolls, propping me up in a small chair, changing my clothes, combing my hair with a wig brush. How she kept the servants from finding out sooner was beyond my comprehension at the time.

It might have gone on longer, if she had not wandered away while giving me a bath. The drugs that kept me immobilized had started to wear off. I sat alone in the bath, freezing, but I managed to shift in the icy water, sploshing it onto the floor and letting out a rusty moan.

That racket alerted one of the servants, the house boy. Kozou Sakaki, the son of our butler, who broke down the bathroom door and scooped me out of the tub. He took one look at me, blue with cold, and wrapping me in his jacket, he bundled me down to the servant’s quarters. I have a vague memory of gripping his arm weakly with one hand, feeling a sudden small flare of warmth under my touch. My savior nearly dropped me, but managed to right himself and grip me closer. At the time, I had no idea what had happened. I would not say that it was an awakening, but I knew then that I was not as other people were, that somehow, besides being pale-skined and silver-haired, I was different down to the fiber of my being.

That same young man now serves as my steward and principal manservant: in some ways, he’s hardly let me out of his sight since the moment he saved my life.

In the meantime, my mother nearly went mad hunting high and low for me, but the elder Sakaki and the rest of the servants managed to restrain her: they were not about to let the master’s son fall into her hands, after I had nearly frozen to death.

My grandfather returned from his trip a few days after this incident, and on finding out what had happened informed my father that his wife had gone mad and nearly killed his son. Subsequently, I was placed in my grandfather’s care, with the elder Sakaki, and his son as well as two other servants.

When I turned twelve, and had made it clear that I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps into the medical field, my grandfather took me to the storage room next to his office and turned me loose in the boxes containing his old case files. He stressed that this would introduce me to several things: how to keep patient records, and what to expect when I was qualified and had a practice of my own. Once I finished my regular lessons, I turned my attention to these moldering files, immersing myself in their contents.

One file in particular stood out from the rest, a file starting in the autumn of 1918, a case of a young man horribly burned, who had been brought in by a farmer who had found him half-dead in a ditch. The youth was hardly expected to live, much less make a full recovery, since this was before effective plastic surgery to repair the damage caused by third degree burns was possible. The young man managed to heal without even so much as a scar to show he had survived this ordeal. A total recovery like this was nothing less than miraculous.

But though his body has mended, the young man had not healed emotionally. For days on end, he lay in a near-comatose catatonic state, refusing to eat or drink, nor did he sleep during this time. And yet he did not become debilitated from this state. From time to time, however, the catatonia lifted and the young man became agitated, crying out incoherently, throwing himself to the floor or trying to harm himself with whatever lay at hand.

This went on for years, with the strange youth kept confined to a room in the clinic that my grandfather had set up in a wing of the family mansion, rooms which my mother now occupied.

Near the top of the file lay several sepia toned photographs of the nameless patient, taken at different intervals, including one of the youth lying with his wrists tied to the headboard, to prevent him from attempting suicide. As evidence of one attempt at self-harm, one of his eyes was heavily bandaged, while the other stared into the camera in that infamous “thousand yard stare”, seen on the faces of trauma survivors. According to the notes, the youth’s eyes were violet, a shade not seen in humans.

There were more photos, dated from after the youth's death in 1926: the site of a train wreck in 1930, a military installation on Iwo Jima, a construction site accident in the 1950s -- at each one, the face of the same young man could be seen among the people on the scene, his form a bit ethereal compared to the others.

And his face was beautiful as well, the delicate face of an angel or a kindly demon. At that age, I was still trying to discern who and what I was. The abuse my mother had inflicted on me had left me skittish around women and I felt considerably more at ease with other males. But the Catholic teachings that my father had had drilled into me left me wary of the feelings I had started to sense around other males.

The youth even started to figure in my dreams. I dreamt of him lying on the pillow beside mine, letting me caress his face consolingly and kiss his soft lips gently. When I snapped awake, I found that illusion had gotten the better of nature, and my thighs were gummy with ejaculate.

I dared not breathe a word of this to my father, but instead, I took it to my grandfather, as we sat in the garden, I under an umbrella, he in the sun to soothe his aching joints. I started blithering lines from Leviticus, whereupon he held up one worn hand, stopping me.

“One thing that Christians forget is that their God-Man came to fulfill the old law, not to start the whole cycle again,” he warned. “As long as Christians continue to demonize man’s need for earthly pleasures, they will be trapped by their own fears. Follow your heart, Kazutaka. Give this family an heir to carry on the name, but remember that you are a young man with needs. Don’t let the seed build up in your body, and don’t let a handsome face that’s smiled back to you pass by you.”

He then let me in on a secret: he too was fond of both a woman’s cave and a man’s eel. His male secretary had, for a long time, also been his lover though at this point, the most they could expect was to share each other’s company and warmth.

It might seem shocking to Western sensibilities, but in the East, while sensuality has its place, we are much more frank about it in that place. The body is as much a part of a man or woman as the soul or the mind, rather than a sack of flesh attached to an ethereal spirit. Even today, in many places, family members share a bath, and a young girl’s menarche is celebrated by her family with a dinner of rice and red beans. The age of consent is considerably lower than in the West: fifteen for both boys and girls, since our young people are not insulated from knowing about the flesh and its needs.

My grandfather treated me more like an adult than like a child, and it is a credit to him: I was that kind of child who had a head full of knowledge and despised adults who insisted on talking down to him.

The things that my mother had done, the abuse she had inflicted on me, left deep scars in my psyche and for a time there were things I could not bear, without it triggering a fresh pain memory in me -- and which at times still disturb me to this day, though now I far better equipped to handle these flash backs. I could not bear to linger in a cold room or to bathe in cold water, and being bound in any way, by the bedclothes wrapping around me in the night, for instance, would cause me to go into a panic attack. My grandfather handled this with patience, talking me through it and helping me out of the maelstrom of my fears and back into the light and fresh air.

I did not hate my mother, and I still do not hate her. Her actions toward me, and the memories they left filled me dread, but somehow, with the intuition many children possess, I knew that she suffered from an illness of some kind. I knew, even before my father informed me, that she was ill with some sickness of the mind and heart. I only wished that my father had treated her somehow, that this might not have happened, and so that she would not have been shut away somewhere in the house.

Now that my father was obliged to take my upbringing more seriously, he saw to it that I was properly trained in the Christian faith. By osmosis, I had absorbed the basics of Shinto and Buddhism from some of the servants and my grandfather, even though he went to temple only at the new year and at Obon. I had a vague sense of Christianity, as my mother had learned it from my father. I was still too frail to go to school, and so my father sent for an Xavierian Brother to tutor me in the catechism, and my father started to take me with him to Sunday Mass.

The image of Christ on the cross terrified me at that age, and some of the statues of the saints made me nervous, particularly St. Lucy with her eyes on a platter and St. Sebastian with his torso shot full of arrows. Ironically, years later, I find myself drawn to St. Sebastian.

My father saw to it that I made my First Holy Communion and my Confirmation by the time I was thirteen, much later than was typical for the former, but the priests thought it best that I waited till I had been fully formed in the Faith, given my peculiar upbringing. At my Confirmation, I took the name Sebastian, though I never used it on any forms.

When I turned fourteen, my father enrolled me in the middle school at the school of St. Michel, on an island in the bay of Nagasaki, since he wanted me to be in “a solidly Christian environment”. How little he knew what went on there after hours or when the monks in charge were not looking. Like many all-male schools, there was a certain casual homoeroticism, though the students were careful to veil it behind scrims of “being brotherly”. I witnessed some things which, if they were meant to be “brotherly”, implied a certain amount of incest.

I was not entirely immune to this: Perhaps it was something programmed into me, or perhaps it was simply the fact that I hungered for love wherever I could find it. But I found myself starting to eye some of my classmates with a hesitant and wary interest. I never progressed to the physical level, but there were nights when I lay awake in my bed, breathing in the scent of the boy in the bed next to mine, wondering if he would mind if I reached across the chasm between us and found his hand, if he would clasp it or push it away. Some nights, I put my head under my pillow to muffle these thoughts, other nights I tried to quell my flesh by my own hand. Some nights I dreamt of gentle lovers and slave boys and houris in a hareem, only to awake and find that my imagination had tricked nature, causing it to weep in frustration, leaving my pyjamas and the sheets gummed to my flesh.

My father, at length, got wind of what was going on, and after a semester, pulled me out, sending me instead to the affiliated high school at Shion University in Kyoto.

Despite my social rank and my family’s connections, I suffered for my nascent tendencies: the less open-minded of my classmates subjected me to a certain amount of ridicule. I regularly found tacks in my shoes or rude messages scrawled on the door to my locker. One day a larger youth grabbed me and shoved me into a doorway, pressing against me and asking me if I liked it that way.

At that moment, an even larger young man, his shoulders almost too wide for his blazer and his long brown hair pulled back with a leather thong grabbed my attacker from behind and held him off me. “Maybe you should ask yourself that question,” the taller youth said and tossed the bully away like a wet rag. The troublemaker picked himself up and hurried away, sputtering a reply and looking nervous.

The rumpled young man knelt beside me. “You all right, Muraki-kun?” he asked, in his gruff Kansai accent.

“I’ll live,” I replied, checking myself for bruises. “So who do I have to call my avenging angel?”

He introduced himself as Oriya Mibu. My ears pricked up at that name: my grandfather had spoken highly of the Mibu clan of Kyoto: they might be a rough, matriarchal clan of teahouse managers and shopkeepers, but this served as a front for another trade which they carried on in the shadows, a trade which made them the keepers of the intimate secrets of many of the elite in business and politics. My safety was assured as long as I stayed in Oriya’s good graces: if anyone hassled me, the family members of my aggressor would risk public embarrassment. Thus, I went through most of my school days relatively free of harassment.

Protection was not the only thing that Oriya offered me: he also introduced me to his circle of friends, mostly working class youths studying on scholarship. But there was one girl who stood out, Ukyou Sakuraiji, a girl two years younger than us who had been advanced to a pharmacology class at our level, as preparation to inherit a share in her family’s pharmaceutical company.

It wasn’t her inheritance that attracted me: it was her. She was small and frail, delicate, reminding me of one of the porcelain dolls I collected. And when she looked at me, she did not stare at my pale appearance, she looked at my heart. Despite her frail appearance and her shaky health, she had a strength of spirit that few adults had. She seemed quiet and reserved, but once her confidence was gained, she opened up, displaying a loyalty found only in pets or trusted servants. She saw the best in people and she had an eye for beauty everywhere. She reached into my cracked soul and made it whole.

But sadly, this equilibrium I had reached would not maintain for long.

My seventeenth year was a hard one. I won’t exaggerate when I say that it contained as much hardship as some entire lives. It started in the summer, ironically, after an idyllic moment. I was staying with the Mibu clan at their ancient house in Kyoto, where they maintained a traditional teahouse. In my innocence, I found it odd that they seemed to keep an unusual number of maids and hostesses, but I thought nothing of it: if Seijii Mibu, the proprietor and the father of Oriya chose to have that many servants, it was his business, not mine.

My youthful desires had started to leaf out that summer, and there were times when I found myself gazing at Oriya during odd moments when I did not think he could see me. But he must have sensed something.

One day, while the maids and Oriya’s tiny but tyrannical Oba-chan had made a shambles of the entire house in the name of a seasonal cleaning, Oriya and I took refuge on the bank of a creek, where he had stashed a purloined bottle of sake in a crevice between the rocks. We sat there, taking turns drinking from the one bottle, my lips quivering as I drank, when I realized my lips had touched the same place that his had.

He must have divined my thoughts, since he took the bottle from me and told me, in his blunt way, that I only had to ask if I needed help relieving those desires: he would be my outlet. I argued but he said that this way, it was safer: he wouldn’t have me submitting myself to some lecherous older man, or let me sneak off the unsavory parts of Shinjuku.

I watched a bead of sweat on the angle of his neck, and fueled by his offer and the sake warming my veins, I leaned in and kissed the angle of his neck, licking away the bead of sweat.

I did not kiss his mouth: somehow that seemed improper. He let me open his yukata and let my hands rove over his torso -- I had gotten in a few inches growth, but he still seemed like a massive beast next to me. Recognizing my awkwardness, he pushed me onto the grass, gruffly but with his own brand of concern, and freed my loins from my trousers, teasing me at my lack of originality despite my knowledge of the human body before he lowered his mouth over my quickening shaft.

I remember yelping with shock and pleasure as I spent myself into his mouth. I remember going limp and languid with pleasure under him, not moving till he lay down beside me and I turned to look into his eyes. He granted me one of his rare smirks of reassurance and let me lay my head on his shoulder. I may have dozed off: Out coupling had left me logy, as if I had eaten a large meal.

Somehow, my father learned of this: perhaps one of the maids prattled that she had seen me in the morning, sprawled naked and content on the young master’s futon. But I soon got my earful from my father. I was forbidden to spend the night under the same roof as Oriya, which was difficult during the school year since we shared the same dormitory.

My father felt determined to “cure” me of my proclivities. Hearing that I had a girlfriend was a consolation, but it was not enough. I could have taken up with Ukyou as a token girlfriend.

And so, the weekend of my seventeenth birthday, he held a small dinner party in my honor at Kokakuro, ostensibly an early celebration of my coming of age.

However, one of the hostesses sat close beside me all through the meal, a woman named Wisteria, who had, she claimed, been a geisha until her patron’s rival had gashed her face during a fight. The scar on her cheek was a sight, but it did not disfigure her entirely. I thought she was prettier for it, somehow.

Once the party had wound down, Wisteria somewhat flirtatiously said she would warm up my bed for me. In my innocence, I thought she was joking, till I went to the room which I normally shared with Oriya, and found Wisteria laying beneath my comforter. I sputtered an objection to her presence, and she sweetly invited me to lay down beside her. I refused, but in all honesty, the sight of her form excited my youthful senses. Even still, I approached her hesitating. I asked her if my father had bought her services for the night with me in mind. She admitted that he had, that he had hoped I would find her company and the gift of her flesh delightful.

I did not know what to think: one part of me wanted to throw her out of the room, while another begged me to lay down with my head between her soft breasts, while a third part of me was so angered, I wanted to beat her just to spite my father. Instead, I approached her and reached to caress her face nervously. She reached out and unbuttoned my jacket and my shirt, running her practiced hands over my chest.

At some point, she let me open her robes, letting me caress her skin… Hours later, I lay with my face pillowed on her chest, her hand stroking my hair languidly. I discovered, as I had with Oriya, that I felt the same full-bellied sensation, my hunger finally appeased.

This was not the be the only shock that my father had in store for me that winter: a week after my birthday, during my winter break from school, I came home to find a stranger in my house, with my father.

It was another young man the same age as I, and a shade taller and broader than, with a more muscular build. His hair was medium brown and his eyes were a greenish hazel like my father's. But his face was thin and a trifle effeminate like mine, only there was a twist of a cruel smirk in one corner of his mouth most of the time, as if the universe were a cosmic joke to him. Except for the difference in coloration, we might have been mirror images of each other.

“Kazutaka, I want you to meet your half-brother, Saki Shidou,” my father informed me.

A brother. And a grown one at that. His mother, Mineko Shidou, a former patient of my father's had passed away from complications following the removal of an otherwise benign tumor and so my father had taken sole custody of the boy, in a bid to assume full responsibility for his offspring.

My father expected us, in so many words, to get along, and reminding us to treat each other as brothers. But my father, who'd been an only child, ignored the fact that not all siblings can get along amicably.

That sealed the matter: I was now merely the second son. This change of status would not have bothered me much if Saki, and my father, did not find reasons to remind me of this at every turn. My father expected us to treat each other as equals, but it soon became obvious which of us he favored, which one was a cuckoo he had brought into the family and what he thought of me.

It started in small things: jabs about my pale appearance or my bookish ways, that soon went from jabs to outright insults. Shoves and elbows to the ribs started out as mischievous jabs but soon left bruises. He stole things from my room which I needed for school.

I caught myself mentally jotting notes of awful things that could happen to Saki, things that I did not dare to write down, in case he should come across it: minor things like horrific road accidents or falling afoul of a motorcycle gang, or major things like the mitochondria in his cells turning cancerous, till his body turned into one large tumor. In some of these, I saw myself as an anti-hero turning up too late to save the victim and then having to euthanize him. If I hadn’t gone into medicine, I suppose that I could have become a horror novelist.

It soon became clear where my father’s favor rested. He was constantly praising Saki’s accomplishments, while mine were minimized or ignored. Granted, some of it was expected: I got moderate marks, at best, in physical education, while Saki was the captain of his school’s kendo team. But others were less than understandable: some poems of mine won a literary contest and were published in a newspaper, but my father did not even read them. I made it into an advanced class in biology, but this was overshadowed by Saki’s acceptance into an advanced class in finances.

In retrospect, Saki would have made an excellent financier, but at the time, he seemed a braggart and a dilletante. If anything, his presence made me feel more isolated from my own blood family and closer to the family of friends I had found.

I wouldn’t call my appearance painfully thin, but in my father’s eyes, I looked unhealthily thin. Never mind that, aside from some persistent problems with my sinuses, I was fairly healthy. He was sure that I wasn’t eating properly, though Sakaki and my grandfather both informed my father that I had a healthy appetite. My father put me on an odd diet that involved practically pouring pints of egg nog down my throat, but the only effect that it caused was that I developed an aversion to egg nog: I still stayed whippet-thin.

My emerging tendencies made me a target for more than my father’s criticism and suspicions, they made me the butt of Saki’s scorn. He comported himself politely in front of my father, while echoing my father’s suspicion. But in private, it was a different matter.

Saki once found me sketching by a window, drawing from memory the image of the young man with the violet eyes. My half-brother’s shadow fell over the page and I looked up to find Saki standing over me, eying the page narrowly, a smirk playing about his mouth.

“And just who is that you’re drawing?” he asked. “Your latest heart-throb?”

“It’s none of your business,” I replied, trying to ignore him as I reached for a softer pencil.

He found my kneadable eraser and started to scrub out part of what I’d drawn. I tried to pull the page away from him, but he tugged on the pad, pulling it back toward him.

“What are you going to do if I don’t stop? Run to father and tell on me?” Saki sneered.

“Saki, this is mine, please leave it alone,” I snapped.

He grabbed the edge of the sheet and tore it off, crumpling it. “Try drawing girls for a change and I will.”

“I’ll draw what I wish: you’re my half-brother, not my teacher,” I said.

“Older brother,” he corrected before walking away.

It might have ended there if, a few weeks later when the family was visiting the Mibu clan, Saki had not caught me resting with Oriya, my head on his knee while the older lad was cleaning and polishing his sword.

“So, you’ve found someone to polish your other sword, the one you keep under your kimono?” Saki sneered.

“Quiet, Kazutaka is sleeping: he’s been burning the oil lamps late preparing for his finals,” Oriya replied.

“Oh, I’ll bet he’s tired: you probably wore him out. If you like them thin and frail, why not find a girl? Your family has plenty of them,” Saki retorted.

“Why not find one of your own, or have you scared them off with that sharp tongue of yours?” Oriya replied.

“I see that I’m not the only one who’s deft with a blade,” Saki replied and left us alone.

I suspect that the only reason why he did not try anything further with Oriya is because of my friend’s size and because he was more skilled at kendo than Saki: as young as Oriya was, he was already competing against adults since he’d beaten the fighters in his age group.

But he got his revenge later on.

One night, I awakened from a sound sleep hearing footsteps on my carpet. A shadow fell over me and I felt a hand slide under my comforter, like a snake gliding into Eden. My loins cringed as that hand found my groin. I tried to roll away, but Saki’s hand clamped down on my throat.

“Don’t move,” he said, his one hand continuing to grope where it didn’t belong. “Is that how you like it? Because you’re too weak to handle a woman?”

I tuned my mind out from the unpleasant sensations crawling through my flesh. I thought of a dozen retorts, but only my fear kept me from snapping back at Saki, things like, _“Well, you’re always going on about how weak women are, I guess you must be weaker than I if a woman is all you can handle,” and “I might be more of a man since my lover is a head taller than I.”_ But again, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

That following summer, both my family and Ukyou’s retired to a house on Lake Ashinoko, which Ukyou’s family owned. I suspected that my father was trying to arrange a match between Ukyou and Saki, since he kept trying to push them together on every outing we made. If we went boating, Saki was told to take Ukyou with him. If we attended a garden party at a neighboring house, Saki escorted Ukyou. She quietly forbore with him, but the moment she could, she almost flew to my side. More than once, this lead to Saki and I exchanging words and one time we came to blows. When my father stepped in to separate, Saki accused me of throwing the first punch, despite my innate pacifism.

Finally one morning, I awoke hearing screams coming from the rear garden. I had been asleep on the screen porch at the rear of the house because of the heat. I rose and ran out, clad still in my pyjamas, following the shouts.

I came to the summer house, on the steps of which, Saki lounged, a smirk of satisfaction on his face. From the shadows of the summer house came a girl’s hysterical sobs.

“What did you do?” I demanded.

“Nothing you should worry about, Kazu-kun,” he replied, the smirk growing broader and more cruel.

“Kazutaka?” a small voice called from the darkness of the summer house. I recognized Ukyou’s voice immediately: I tried to rush inside, but Saki tripped me, sending me sprawling on the decking.

“She’s too good for the likes of you, fag-boy,” Saki drawled, sitting on my back. “Find another of your kind and get that disease they’re all catching.”

By this time, the commotion had alerted some of the servants and the family, who came crowding out onto the rear lawn. Saki excused his appearance, claiming that he had been out for a walk when Ukyou approached him: he claimed their coupling had been consensual, but the evidence, the injuries Ukyou had suffered, proved otherwise, though my father sided with his favored son, refusing to believe otherwise.

That ended the summer vacation: Ukyou’s family refused any further contact between her family and mine. For a time, I was not allowed to speak with her, which was not easy since we were in the same class. We had to exist as the two lovers on the opposite shores of the River of Heaven.

Many times that year, Oriya let me cry on his breast, when no one could see us. He ran a hand over my hair, reassuring me that Ukyou still loved me, whatever Saki had done to her:

I have found that oftentimes, the young and the old are more observant than the middle-aged who think themselves all-knowing and wise. My grandfather and I noticed it first: my father’s health had started to decline and very suddenly. His complexion took on a grayish cast and he tired easily than a man of his year should. He insisted that the cause lay in his worry over his patients, or my mother’s condition, or my “inability” to get along with Saki.

As time went on, my father continued to decline. I had developed a habit of walking quickly and carefully, which allowed me to slip along hallways without Saki detecting me. And so I took to monitoring the hall leading to my father’s study, where he kept a small liquor cabinet. On one occasion, I spotted Saki slipping into the room, taking something out of his pocket. I nearly called out to him, but my fear of being caught and cornered and likely pummeled made my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.

An hour later, Sakaki found my father in full cardiac arrest, likely poisoned.

The next morning, my father died while under sedation in the hospital. The word spread quickly through the house, somehow reaching my mother’s quarters. This announcement enraged her and she broke loose from her keepers, intending to avenge her mate’s death.

I was on a staircase, trying to help the servants contain her: I thought I saw Saki lurking in a turn of the staircase, but in the commotion I could not be sure. The next moment, my mother had fallen down a twenty foot stretch to the bottom of the stairs. I could only surmise that Saki had tripped her, but in the hubbub, I could not prove it and even if I could, no one would believe me, given the rivalry between my half-brother and me.

Preparations for my father’s funeral were put on hold till my mother’s condition was stabilized. My grandfather saw that she was sedated, but he confided to me that there was likely no hope for her recovery.

I had not been able to protect my father from the cuckoo he had brought into the family nest, and so I decided that I had to do something to protect my mother. Late that evening, I stole into her room when no one was watching and while she slept, I adjusted the flow on the IV of painkillers taped into her arm. I sat there, holding her hand until I felt it grow cold and stiff.

The room lay in darkness except for the light of the moon shining through the windows. But of a sudden, the moonlight went dark and a reddish glow suffused the room. I let go my mother's hand and rushed to the window, gazing up at the moon. The silvery disk had turned the color of blood in an old wound and it seemed larger, hovering just above the tops of the pine trees and the shedding maples that surrounded our gardens.

The sight made my heart hammer in my chest. Was this a sign from God or the gods that I had done wrong? My only intent had been to push my mother beyond the reach of the monster who had injured her.

I fled. I did an irrational and cowardly thing in leaving the house, but my youth and inability to process all this lead me to make this error. I caught a late train to Kyoto, the red moon chasing me over the tops of the silhouetted trees and power lines as they sped past my window. I ran to the last place where I had felt safe, where I knew my secrets would find a safe hiding place. I ran to the old section of the city and hid myself with Oriya’s family. Oriya’s grandmother gave me leave to stay, but on the condition that I left in the morning. I spent part of that night, weeping on Oriya’s breast, as if my heart would burst.

Deep in the night, I awakened, feeling a strange sensation, as if something had turned over in my head. It frightened me as much as the deed that had lead me here, and I pulled away from Oriya, sitting by the window, watching the red moon set till the sky paled with the approach of day.

Oriya’s grandmother hardly had to insist on my departure: Sakaki arrived, looking for me and insisting that I return home immediately. I did not have to be told twice, though I dreaded my return and Saki’s derisive comments. Why had I fled like that? Why had I not stayed? I certainly couldn’t tell them of the mercy kill that I had made.

My brother met my tearful replies with mockery: “Not man enough to live without your mama?” Somehow, that time, I did not think of a smart remark.

The funeral ended up as a double ceremony, but as the procession wound its way from the temple to the burying ground, the priest gave Saki the place of the elder son. As I walked beside him, I overheard the wives of two of my father’s colleagues whispering to each other.

“Poor boy, first it’s his father and now his mother.”

“One of those mysterious deaths: how creepy!”

I heard Saki’s breath catch in what he likely intended to be a sob, but I glanced at him in time to see a smirk of derision cross his face.

The day after the funeral, I resumed my usual studies, but Saki, as the elder brother and heir to the family fortune, stayed at home, talking with the solicitors and my grandfather, who grudgingly had to deal with the fallout of the past few days.

When I returned home late that afternoon, Saki was waiting for me on the enclosed back porch, polishing his sword.

"Well, the other son and surviving child has returned," he drawled, eying me in contempt. "Come to argue with that wheezing old codger over who should inherit what?"

"No, but there is one thing that I want to know," I said. "Did you kill my parents?"

In reply, Saki rose, swinging the sword in an angle before him. The tip of the blade grazed my cheek, close enough to draw blood. I staggered backward, tripping over my own feet and sprawling on my back. I tried to rise, but Saki lunged at me.

He raised the sword again, that cruel smirk of his twisting his face.

"Saki... you bastard!" I screamed.

The sword plunged toward my throat, but it suddenly fell to one side of me. A shot rang out. Saki’s face went grey and his legs went slack as he toppled forward, a film of blood on his lips. He fell, his long body covering me. With nerveless fingers, I held him for a moment, then pushed him aside as I looked up at the elder Sakaki, standing over me with a smoking rifle in hand.

“I’m sorry, young master,” he said, lowering the weapon. “You are safe now.”

I likely fainted from the stress of the situation, and from everything that went before it. I awakened later, in my own bed, the younger Sakaki mopping my face with a cool cloth.

“What happened?” I asked, trying to sit up, but he pushed me down gently.

“Your half-brother will never harm you again,” he said.

I did not ask where Saki was: I did not want to know just then. Instead, I lay back on my pillows, feverish from the stress of the past few weeks and let these thoughts pass as I focused on recovering

It would not be until many years later that I would find out what had happened to Saki Shidou, and by then, something stranger would have come into my life. But at that time, I had to focus on finishing my studies and taking up my father’s estate once I came of age.

The year took its toll on my grandfather as well. His health, which had been slowly declining, grew rapidly worse; a biopsy proved he had advanced lung cancer and was not expected to live for much longer. He had enough time to finish putting the estate in order before the end came.

That put a seal on that dreadful year: I was eighteen now, the sole heir to the family fortune, with the servants and the family solicitors to keep an eye on me. Sakaki had been appointed as guardian to me till I came of age. Till I completed my studies and was qualified, in order to take up my father’s practice in the clinic which the family owned, I would receive a modest allowance from a trust fund.

I remember standing in what had been my father’s bedroom, trying on one of his suits: I was easily his height now, but I was still on the wrong side of the line between ‘aesthetically slender’ and ‘looking underfed’ and so it hung loose on me. I had also started wearing eyeglasses, which gave my face an owlish look, but which also made me look more scholarly and added a few years to my appearance.


	2. Half Moon: College and Adulthood

Because I had studied at the affiliated high school, I matriculated into Shion University's medical school; among my professors was one Hideaki Satomi, a former fellow student of my fathers, and a protege of my grandfather's

Going to college the following year put some distance between me and the places that reminded me of the past and the demons that lurked there. Oriya had gone on to study the basics of general medicine for a year, along with a business course, in a bid to add an air of respectability to his accomplishments and to learn how to tend to any girls who were injured (his family’s establishment prided itself on treating the girls with care, but there was always the risk of a client treating them rough). With Ukyou continuing her pharmacology studies we chose to split the rent on a small apartment close to the campus. My allowance provided me with a modest lifestyle.

I had always been a fast learner who absorbed information as the earth absorbs water, but in college, I plowed through my studies, finishing in three years what took most students six years to complete. Perhaps the tragedies I had endured had inspired me to keep busy and keep the demons of memory at bay.

Oriya and I were still intimate, though given the size of our apartment, we had to keep our encounters as discreet as possible. Ukyou suspected nothing, and while she loved me and valued my friendship and Oriya’s, she had little use for the physical side of love.

That, however, did not make it any less awkward when she found us together just after a passionate moment. She fled the apartment in shock: I followed her to explain. She accepted my apologies, but she asked me point blank if I still loved her. I told her that her love meant as much to me as life itself, and yet there were things which my spirit and senses needed which she simply could not provide.

She accepted this, but it was some time before we were at ease with each other.

There were few young men who were discreetly vocal about their proclivities, and so I was often at a loss for a suitable companion in pleasure, aside from Oriya, and I knew that he did not always want me under him.

I had noticed that Satomi eying me furtively out of the corner of his eye when he clearly thought that I couldn’t see him doing it, as a rat might eye a piece of fish when the cat might be about. He wasn’t the most desirable partner, as he often smelled of chemicals and he was hardly the most attractive individual.

Finally one night, as we were clearing up the lab after a long day, I turned to him and said, “You know that you may ask: I’ve seen you looking at me as you were afraid I might eat you.” I smirked suggestively and added, “Unless you’d rather have me eating you in a different order.”

He bowed to me humbly, and sputtered a reply: “The fact of the matter is, I was always attracted to your mother: you grow to resemble her more and more every day, and I could not help noticing that. I want to apologize if my gazing on you offended you.”

“So if you couldn’t have her, you’d have her offspring?” I asked.

“People might talk: they talk about me enough, as it is,” he said, his gaze darting about as if he expected someone might be hiding the dark corners of the lab.

“There are ways of getting people not to talk,” I said, shifting and leaning back against a work table. “They won’t talk about me: they’re afraid of me.”

And so I let him bend me over a desk, literally. In another time, this kind of encounter between a master and a student would not have been winked at. One time he tried to enter me from the rear, and I nearly threw him across the room. I apologized, but our furtive encounters came to an end. I won’t say that I was relieved, but I won’t say I didn’t miss them either.

The year that I started specialization as a surgeon, I was offered the chance to travel: Oxford’s College of Surgery offered an exchange program. Seven of their students would study at Shion University, while seven of my class would be studying at Oxford. Our names were chosen by lots from among the top students, and by luck, I was one of the selected. This left Ukyou and I concerned, but I reassured her that I would write every week and call her as often as I could.

We arrived in Heathrow Airport after a grueling twenty-four flight across the Pacific Ocean and North America. The Harknesses. The host family that was receiving us was welcoming, but that didn’t quite stop them from staring up at me, marveling that there could be a six foot platinum blonde from the Far East. I calmly explained that I had been born looking as I did; thankfully, they left the matter at that, but it wouldn’t be the last time there would be some ethnic confusion. A neighbor of the Harkness family, an older woman who lived in the row house next to theirs, was fond of coming to call, and happened to arrive when I was there in the kitchen, making myself a pot of matcha. On spying me, the elder neighbor chirped, “Oh, I thought you had some Chinamen coming to stay with you.” In my faulty English, I gently replied that I was from a little further to the east of China.

And then there was the neighbor on the other side, who somehow took it into her head that I was an exchange student from Sweden, even approaching me and chattering at me in Swedish. I had to keep from laughing out loud at that one, when I gently told her she had the wrong continent in mind.

My studies abroad gave me a certain amount of freedom: I pierced my ears as well as my nipples, wearing garnet studs through the former and fine platinum rings through the latter (I found to my irritation that I was allergic to silver), a bit of youthful rebellion that added to my "exotic" appearance. I started “playing the field”, as it were, in a bid to silence the hunger within. I knew about the immunodeficiency disease that had started to appear among men of my persuasion, and thus I took the necessary precautions. Perhaps, in a strangely providential way, the abuse that Saki had inflicted on me had left me abhorring being penetrated anally, a practice which puts one at the most risk for infection.

The fact that British colleges are less strict that Japanese colleges in terms of course load left me with some amount of time on my hands. Thus, I looked about for a course unrelated to my studies to fill that gap in my schedule, and eventually, I matriculated into a class on mythology taught by one Clive Decker, known among the students as “Dotty Decker” for his eccentricities. The man looked like an eccentric, with his bushy graying hair and the flowing, wizard-like robe he insisted on wearing over a fraying grey suit. He had studied ceremonial magick with the famous or perhaps infamous Alastair Crowley, and thus his lectures were full of stories of strange creatures he had seen with his own eyes.

I could tell that the class generally looked on some his tales with a measure of skepticism, but I accepted these tales as his word: I had heard of Shinto priests summoning spirits to protect mankind, and so I listened with an open heart.

Decker must have noticed my attentiveness, since after one session, he called me to his office to speak to me in private.

“I’m surprised that someone in surgical medicine would be studying mythology,” he noted, sitting back in a well-worn leather chair.

“I have broad tastes,” I replied, simply but honestly. “If I hadn’t gone into medicine, I would have become a poet or a novelist.”

“Are you sure that is the only reason why? I’ve heard you described as the young man with the hungry eyes,” he said.

“My eyes looked like this from the time I was small,” I replied. “My mother had albinism, and I seem to have inherited it from her.”

He wagged his head. “It isn’t just the color or the shape of your pupils. There’s a hungry look in them,” he said. “Humor me, Mister Muraki, do you know what an energy feeder is?”

“I’ve heard of hungry ghosts who feed off the lifeforce of the living,” I replied.

“That’s one way in which they take form, but what would you call a living being who depends upon the lifeforce of others as part of its nourishment?” he asked.

“Do you mean something like a vampire?” I asked, starting to wonder if there was more to that nickname of his than just an affectionate jab.

“Something like that,” he replied. “But I don’t mean something that sleeps in a coffin or turns into a bat or which is repulsed by crucifixes. I mean someone who is very much alive, and yet who cannot maintain their well-being without using the emotions of those around them as a means to feed on their life force. Have you ever known a girl who seemed as though she had to stir up trouble among her friends and acquaintances simply because she could? Or someone who wasn’t particularly easy on the eyes, yet they attracted people just by their personality. You might have witnessed an energy vampire.”

“So what does this have to do with your class?” I asked.

“Perhaps a better question might be, what does this have to do with you?” he asked.

“Do you think that I might be an energy vampire?” I asked, adjusting my eyeglasses incredulously.

“You have the look of one: the way you carry yourself, the look in your eyes. You keep to yourself, and yet you will chat with anyone who strikes up a conversation with you. I’ve heard rumors of your proclivities -- Don’t worry. There’s no shame in who you prefer to spend a Saturday night, as long as they welcome your attentions..

“But it does happen that you feel more satisfied after a good night with a lover than after a good meal, right?”

I blinked at this assessment. “Have you been stalking me?”

He shook his head. “Nothing so vulgar or intrusive, but I have been keeping tabs on you. It wouldn’t be right if someone were to realize what you are and if that someone should be a vampire hunter.”

I recalled reading a filler article in a London newspaper, an item about a man who styled himself as a modern-day Van Helsing, who’d staked a girl in the heart because she frequented goth clubs and dressed like a Hollywood vampire, claiming to be a blood drinker. I had thought the girl sounded a bit histrionic, but I was not about to pass judgment on her choice of lifestyle. A blood disease exists known as porphyria, which some call the vampire disease, since it makes the sufferer sensitive to light and some are known to try drinking the blood of others. But even if I did feel deeply revived by a night on the town, I didn’t see myself as a vampire of any kind.

But then I thought of the time when the moon had turned blood red when I had put my mother out of her sufferings. I thought of the story that my grandfather told of the night I was born, when the moon had turned red and I had quickened in his arms.

“What would you say,” I started, hesitating for a moment. “What would you say if the moon were to turn red when someone had taken the life of another in an act of mercy?”

He said nothing for a moment, looking at me, then rose, opened the hall door, looked out and closed it before returning to me.

“I would say,” he began, speaking in a lower voice. “That this person was an energy phage of a high order. Most likely you are not fully awakened, but you will need to take care that this does not happen: if it did, you might possibly become a danger to yourself and to others around you. But I can help you to contain it, in the event that should happen.”

“You know how to control the hunger?” I asked.

“I know a few techniques to help you contain it and I know how it can be fed properly. But you are the one who must decide if you are to walk in the light or in the darkness,” he said.

And so we met on the sly for my private lesson: he taught me the basics of energy manipulation and feeding: I knew how to redirect the flow of spirit energy from the martial arts training that I had had, but this would be a different application of the same principle. He taught me how to absorb small "tastes" of energy by a simple touch. He instructed me about the "tendrils" which extend from an energy feeder's aura, and trained me in using them to collect the ambient energy that drifts off from large groups of people. He taught me to use gentle compulsions to influence people to be more receptive to my attentions, friendly or intimate. And with the help of a woman he knew who had studied witchcraft, he taught me how to feed more efficiently from a lover. It wasn't that I had been doing it wrong, but I needed to learn how to maximize the energy flow generated by such an encounter.

He also taught me to dream walk, to seek out a donor whom I knew and from whom I'd taken a psychic "scent", and approach them while the both of us slept. This was a less efficient way to feed, since it meant having to burn energy in order to collect it, but it would do in a pinch, if time or circumstances did not allow me to approach a donor in the waking world. Decker let me feed from him this way, till I grew profficient at it and I could dream walk him or another from a distance.

But above all, he taught me never to take too much from a donor, in case they came to harm immediate or otherwise: there was an off-chance that I might take too much and leave a person unconscious or in a coma.

I realize now that this was the beginning of the end. It was at this point that I started to walk the razor’s edge between light and darkness, humanity and vampirism, if I had ever been fully human before then. I do not blame Decker, I know that he meant well: he saw what I was and he intended to protect me. But I wonder what he would think now, of the monster which his student became. I wonder now if he had some contingency, some ritual seal that would hold back the darkness, or if he would seek to destroy the creature which he had unwittingly helped to awaken.

Over the course of our time studying together, Decker gently persuaded me to talk to him about my childhood and adolescence, asking me if I had suffered any major traumas or illnesses. I actually laughed and told him that in a way, my youth had been a series of traumas interrupted by moments of peace and joy.

As soon as I told him that, his face grew grim. “You’ll need to take care as to what emotions you choose to use as an anchor for when you feed: your inner demon may have already been conditioned to feed from the darker emotions and that can turn it to darkness. If it is awakened, that may not bode well for you.”

“What about lust?” I asked, dryly, considering my preferred method of nourishing myself.

Decker wagged his head. “Lust is a border emotion: it can be lighter or darker, depending on the situation. You would take care if you found lovers who are sanguine in temperament.”

He started to train me in what might be called the dark arts: he taught me various rituals that would allow me to tap into my strength without awakening the beast within. He taught me how to draw energy from nature, when I could not find a human source of nourishment, to feed from storms and the wind and from the earth itself. He taught me how to feed from a person more efficiently. He taught me how to embrace my darkness without fear. I wonder now what he would think of his student and what he has become.

I likely sound as though I was a hermitic young man, and I was, admittedly, rather shy, not given to speaking unless spoken to. But I was an avid people-watcher, carrying a pocket-sized sketch pad in which I would sketch faces I’d seen, or to jot down poems that came to mind as I was walking to class.

I was discreet in my excursions, lest my host family learn of my proclivities: the climate in England was till icy toward men of my persuasions, but nowhere as hostile as it was in my homeland. Still, one had to exercise all due caution.

I returned to Japan two years later, more assured of myself as a future physician and as an entity. I qualified to intern at the clinic that my father had owned, and now it was time that I set about settling into my inheritance.

Japanese clinics operate differently than Western ones: Most are privately own by families which, like mine, have been physicians for generations. Since my father had been an only child, and only one of his sons had survived to assume the management, two of his colleagues had been appointed to maintain the facility till I came of age and was qualified. Ishida Saito, the elder of the two, was considered the brains of the operation, while Maki Asura, the younger, was the heart, the one with the warm bedside manners and the kindly approach. They held the fort while I was completeing my studies, and they guided me during my internship: Asura treated me more like a brother than a colleague, while Saito kept a hawk-like watch on me, making sure I made no mistakes and correcting me when necessary. The medical field is a hard one to navigate and he did not want me to become the kind of physician who rested on his family's success. He was the better for meof the two, as time would prove.

The family mansion felt too large and rambling now, and so I had the number of servants reduced to the minimum necessary to maintain it. I retired to the house only when I had a day or two to spare. When I was working, I lived in the city, in an apartment that I originally had set up for Ukyou and I: most of the time, she preferred to live with her family, but she was not above staying with me on weekends.

The family practice had not exactly fallen into ruin while I had been completing my studies, but the patients had been farmed out among my father’s colleagues at the clinic.

In my twenty seventh year, I was qualified to begin practicing medicine, and I soon matriculated into the staff of the clinic that was part of my inheritance. At that time, I made the acquaintance of Takeshi Kakyouin, whose family were friends and associates of my father. Like my father, he was a second son who had come into his inheritance suddenly. The family’s shipping business had fallen on hard times, but Kakyouin had managed to pull it back together and improve upon it. He summoned me to examine his twelve year old daughter Tsubaki, a frail girl who seemed to be suffering the same congenital heart ailment that had claimed the life of her mother. She appeared to suffer from a combination of heart murmurs and a defect in her heart: the segments of muscle in the back had failed to completely grow together during her prenatal growth, resulting in a hole in the back of her heart. The murmur could be treated medication, as it was the sort of defect that most children tended to grow out of, but the hole would need to be surgically repaired, if a donor heart could not be found for a transplant.

In time, the medication would help her to grow stronger and to allow her heart to stabilize for a time. As she grew older and stronger, she developed a crush on me. She was, after all, at an impressionable age and transference -- developing an attachment on a caregiver -- wasn’t an unusual side effect. I found her devotion charming, but she was a child, and even as she grew older, I was not about to commit the same folly as my father did with his patients.

Something happened, however, to interrupt my work with Tsubaki Kakyouin: an earthquake struck the city of Kobe, leaving dozens injured by falling debris and trapped in the rubble of their homes and businesses.

I was among the physicians called in to help treat the rescued and to prepare the recovered to be returned to their families. A time like this was perfect for someone with my skills and talents: the number of patients being brought in and the sporadic nature of their discovery kept me awake for hours on end, and so I tapped into my energy reserves, though I knew I would have to feed when this was over. Many of the people brought into the field hospital were in states of panic, worrying over their loved ones, and so I used the gentlest compulsions possible, taking some of the fear from them, cycling it through my self and turning it into peace, which I shared with them through a touch.

That is where I found the answer to the photographs that my grandfather had collected of the mysterious violet-eyed patient after that patient's death. At that time, I tried to write it off as a hallucination induced by exhaustion.

One evening, I'd stepped away from the field hospital to smoke a cigarette, when I spotted him walking away from the hospital, escorting the soul of a man who had died from his injuries as the medical team had tried to keep him alive. The soul leaned on his arm for support, a small, pale figure silhouetted against the tall young man's black trenchcoat. I reached out to probe the young man's aura, sensing that he was not of this world, though he once had been. The young man glanced in my direction, perhaps sensing the probe, and then I saw his eyes, the same shade as the twilight sky. His face was unmistakable: the beautiful, gentle face that had looked out of that photograph with such palpable despair, but the despair had given way to a mix of sadness and cheerfulness, a gentle smile for the souls whom he assisted, to reassure them in their passage, with a hint of sorrow that he had to take them away from this world.

I wanted to approach him, ask him if we could meet later, when he had fulfilled his duties, but I restrained myself: we both had our hands full, no chance for a reprieve. Even as I thought this, he and his charge stepped across the line that divides the mortal world from the realm of the dead.

I had heard legends of the shinigami, the reaper-like beings who escort the souls of the dead into the realm of Enma-Daioh, the lord of the dead, but till now, I thought these stories were mere fables. Much as Hollywood depicts angels as the souls of the just, shinigami are the spirits of the deceased who passed on with some debt of guilt in their hearts, which they could not pay in life.

Shortly afterward, I was called on to treat a young man, Tetsuhiro Hasagawa, the son of an American-born business who'd moved the family back to Japan, a baseball champion who had started to suffer balance problems and severe headaches. An x-ray and the MRIs that had started to come into use, proved the cause to be a tumor pressing on the balance centers of the brain. Surgery revealed the tumor to be benign, and all seemed to have ended well.

In my thirtieth year, everything changed., though life went on. Everything that was no longer was, yet nothing was lost…

Young Hasagawa’s condition deteriorated: he started to experience balance problems once again, and another MRI showed the tumor had returned. This time, I had to go in through the young man’s right eye socket in order to remove it, and despite my care, he ended up losing the eye. A biopsy proved the tumor to be cancerous, and thus weeks of chemotherapy would follow. Even still, the cancer proved to be aggressive, only this time, the tumor had spread to an area that was impossible to access. Though it weighed on my heart, I had to inform the young man’s family that the best they could do for their son was to take him home and make him as comfortable as they could in his last days.

His mother accepted this with resignation, but his father would hear none of it, insisting that there had to be something else that could be done. I replied that the boy had slipped beyond the reach of science. His father grew furious, berating me for not trying hard enough, accusing me of negligence. At length, I had to summon security to escort the man from the clinic before his shouts disturbed the other patients in the clinic.

A week later, I received the call that no physician wants to receive: the visiting nurse attending Tetsuhiro Hasagawa called to inform me that the patient had passed away, peacefully in his sleep, but he had nevertheless died. This would not be the first time that a patient of mine had passed away: an eighty year old grandmother whose dislocated hip I had repositioned, had passed away after a long life. It had simply been her time to return to the cycle of death and rebirth.

Even after three years of being a surgeon, I was still very much an idealist, enough that I thought perhaps I could have saved the young man, that perhaps I called it wrongly.

These thoughts kept me distracted as left the clinic that night, stepping out into the alleyway behind it to unlock my car that was parked there.

A shadow detached itself from the darkness and lurched toward me, drunkenly. “Muraki-sensei,” Hasagawa slurred. “You left me without a son; I’m going to return the favor to your father.”

I started to turn toward him: I joked somewhat morbidly, that it would be an unexpected family reunion, since my father was dead.

The scant light glinted on something metallic. As if in a dream, I saw a knife blade rush toward the right side of my face. I raised my hand to grab Hasagawa’s hand, but he grappled with me. Excruciating pain erupted in the side of my head. The right side of my field of vision went dark, stars exploding in the darkness.

At some point I fainted from the pain. I remember nothing till I felt myself rising slowly out of unconsciousness, a bright light shining in my eyes. I heard Asura and Saito talking as they worked over me, trying to keep me alive:

“We’re losing him: he‘s lost too much blood.” -- “His pulse is thready.” -- “His blood pressure is dropping.” I resigned myself that I was dying, so I did not fight the odd, otherworldly feeling that engulfed me.

I heard the heart monitor let out its one-note wail, like a wraith. At that moment I realized that I stood beside the slab where my body lay. I started down at myself, at the blood soaking my shirt and the bloodied mess where my right eye had been.

“It need not end here,” a voice said beside me. I looked up to gaze upon a pale figure clad in white standing beside me. The face resembled my own, only thinner and more cruel, its eyes crimson rather than silver-grey. Its form looked more androgynous than mine, the hips broader under its robes, cut in a way that made me think of a Heian era courtier.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am you: you also am I,” it replied. “I am that which has lain silent within for so long, till this moment when you are close to death. I cannot let that happen: if you should die, then so shall I, but I can give you back your life.”

“So I am dying…” I said, the idea becoming a fact, at least in my awareness.

The being laughed, a short, dry sound like a twig snapping. “I am aware of that, but would you throw away what remains of your life? You have a duty to your practice and your patients, and you have a fiancee who would die of heartbreak if you were gone. Would you throw them away so easily?” It started to turn away. “Very well, if you are resigned to your fate.”

“No, one moment: what are your terms?” I asked.

The entity turned back to me, smirking with obvious interest. “My terms?” it asked.

“What would you have me do?” I asked.

“I would have you surrender your self to me. Let us be as one. Let me embrace you and engulf you completely. Let me be your strength. You need only allow me to feed from the living, either by seduction or by slaying them.

I could not hesitate for much longer: Saito was arranging for an autopsy and he was sending one of the nurses to fetch the forms for the death certificate.

I turned back to the entity and bowed to it deeply. “Do to me as you will.”

The creature smirked viciously and leaned in to nuzzle the side of my face. “We are as one now,” it said, and pushed me backward toward my body, pinning me down before it opened its mouth, showing a double row of shark-like teeth. It then bit down on the side of my neck --

I drew in a deep, gasping breath as I bolted up into a sitting position. The tubes and wires my colleagues had taped to me tore loose. Almost of their own volition, my hands whipped out and grabbed at the first thing they came to: Saito’s neck. The man fought to pry off my hands, even as he gagged under my grip. I felt the man’s life start to flow into me and my strength start to return.

Two orderlies grabbed me, fighting to pry me off my own colleague and pin me back on the slab. It took three more to get me under control, but even then, I fought like a tiger. My own panic from the moment of the attack was feeding the beast within, which turned on them. They managed to get me under control, but the entity within emitted a howl of disgust which I, not yet trained to hide its manifestations, let loose through my own lips. The pandemonium of the moment covered it, and my colleagues merely took it as sign that I was still terrified from the murder attempt.

Asura asked me if I remembered what had happened. By now, the phage had withdrawn to sulk in a far corner of my mind, annoyed at being denied its first true sustenance, allowing me to speak for myself. “Someone attacked me in the alleyway,” I said.

“Did you see his face?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was Hasagawa.”

Asura frowned. “I was afraid he would do something like this,” he said. “You’re lucky the blade didn’t go deep enough. You were dead for five minutes.”

“What… did he do?” I asked.

“You’ve lost your right eye entirely,” he said. “There’s nothing left of it that’s worth saving. You’ll need an ocular implant, as soon as you’ve healed up.”

They kept me in the clinic that night and the next day, keeping me under observation. I was alert, aside from when the painkillers got the better of me and left me drowsy, but it was clear that I would be on administrative leave until I had healed and until the medical board decided that I could continue working.

As soon as I was alert, a police detective came to question me about what had happened. I told them that I knew exactly who had tried to take my life and that I was more than willing to press charges. Later, I would hear that Hasagawa was arrested the very same day.

Ukyou came to visit me; I feared that she might turn away at the sight of me, but instead, she reached out, placing a compassionate hand on my injured face. "What kind of man would do this to anyone? Why would he harm the man who tried to save his son?" she asked.

I leaned into her touch, trying not to sob with relief that she still clearly loved me. "A monster of the worst kind," I replied. I knew then that I had made the right choice when I gave in to the demon within

I must digress for a moment: what are usually called glass eyes are, in these days, made of high impact acrylic; the technical term for them is an ocular prosthesis, which is not to be confused with a visual prosthesis, which would allow the user to see out of that set of visual nerves again. However, in my time, the kind of cyborg eyes one finds in certain animated series were not yet possible. There was one in development, and I went so far as to sign up for the human trials. Unfortunately, the project never made it past the animal trials, and was subsequently shelved. This annoyed me to no end: I am, I will admit, a vain man and I loathed what had happened to my appearance. To say nothing of having to adapt to life with my field of vision diminished by half. Any means possible to restore my lost eye was, it seemed, a good means.

I thought of the mysterious patient that my grandfather had treated, how according to one entry in his treatment log, he had started to harm himself, even gouging out one eye before the orderlies could restrain him, and how that lost eye still grew back. Now I wanted to find him even more than before and, at the urging of the phage within, find a way to isolate his healing ability and graft it to myself, even if that meant transplanting one of his eyes into my empty socket.

The ability is not that unusual, and in fact, it can be found in nature. A small amphibious creature known as the axolotl is able to regenerate its eyes and limbs if they are damaged or lost, but his was the first case I had heard of that ability occurring in a higher animal.

I was determined then to find a similar means of restoring myself: call it madness, but it is said that genius is close to madness.

In the meantime, once my eye socket had healed, I submitted to being fitted with a pale replica of my lost eye. The specialist, a woman from Australia, forbore with me: noting my obvious vanity, she took care to match the color of my remaining eye and the peculiar shape of its pupil as closely as possible. She reassured me that, in time, the eye would feel like a part of me, and that I would do well to take some time to acclimate myself to it, to hold it as long as I needed to before inserting it, even if that had to take place every day.

I am no stranger to handling organs, after the dissections that my grandfather assisted me with and from the cadaver assignments in college, much less during surgeries. But the first time that I looked at what was to become my glass eye, this small pale orb, the sight of it disturbed me. I may have hissed at it. But after a few moments, and several times that I picked it up and put it back into its cloth-lined case, I finally collected the courage to pick it up, clean it, and fit it into my socket.

To this day, I still have mornings when I can barely look at it, but once it is in my socket, it blends in with the rest of my self and I am able to go on with the day. But I still look forward to the day when I can look to my right without turning my head.

Because my albinism affected my vision, I had been issued a provisional driver’s license: I was not permitted to drive after dark. But now that I had lost one eye, the registrars decided that it was in mine and the public’s best interest if I gave up my license. It was a small price to pay and I could well afford to hire a driver or to make use of public transportation. Even still, the indignity was a blow to my ego.

Not long afterward, the medical board deemed it fit to review me to see if I could still continue to perform surgeries. I was still on administrative leave and I could not contest that, but the possibility that I might lose my surgical license was almost more than I could bear.

My will gave way under the strain. I stopped feeding the phage, even though the hunger grew unbearable. I shut myself in my rooms, ordering Sakaki to have meals sent up to me, but not to allow any of the servants to come near my rooms. Finally, to hasten the inevitable, I downed a bottle of barbiturates, washing them down with a bottle of scotch.

Oriya and Sakaki found me sprawled on the bathroom floor. Sakaki was ready to call one of my colleagues, but Oriya took matters into his own hands and thrust his fingers down my throat, causing me to cough up the pills. The phage yowled in my head, dragging me into consciousness.

“You idiot: what was Ukyou going to do if you gave up on her now?” he demanded.

I had no answer to that. He and Sakaki bundled me off to bed, and Oriya let me feed off him, the better to get me back to something vaguely resembling sanity. None of this saw the light of day: two days later, I went before the medical board, performing a test surgery on a pig raised for that purpose. The procedure went without a hitch and I was allowed to retain my license.

At least Kakyouin did not cut ties with me. I was not able to treat his daughter, but he allowed me to visit her. And like Ukyou, she did not flinch from me, from my changed appearance, the white patch covering my missing eye. Instead, she put a hand on my cheek, tracing it along the white strap that held the patch in place. And she told me that I still looked like an angel in her eyes, “an angel who fought a demon and won, but came away from the battle with a wound.”

I knew then that I had to find a cure for this girl, even if it meant that I must break every human law imaginable. She was a gentle creature and I could not let my inner demon harm her. She was growing into a young woman and in time, the phage would see her as a source of nourishment, but I would not let it cross that line, if I could help it. But in time, the phage would find other uses for her.

As the symbiote grew stronger, I continued to record I recorded the changes taking place in my self. Though my introduction to vampirism was metaphysical, I took a scientific approach to my metamorphosis. The fact that I was on administrative leave gave me ample time to pursue this. I recorded copious notes of the changes happening to me.

In the days following the attack, as I continued to recover, my gums, close to my canines, turned sore and achy for no apparent reason: I was diligent about oral hygiene as much as I was about the rest of my personal care. Consulting my dentist, I ordered elective x-rays, which revealed what looked like a second set of canines erupting from my jaw. My dentist joked about how he had always wondered if I was a vampire, which I laughed at. But I knew that a layer of reality lay behind the jest.  
A few weeks later, the budding fangs broke through my gums, but oddly enough, they were not as long as I suspected they would be. Unless the phage was aroused, which caused the fangs to unsheathe, as it were.  
I also started to test my blood sugar levels before and after a feeding. A light feeding, of the kind I would make by skimming from a crowd, would raise the levels as much as a light meal, while a deep feeding would raise it as much as a heavy meal.  
I also noted that, if I had eaten flesh meat on the same day that I made an energy feeding, that absorbing energy did not seem as efficient on days I had not, which would cause the symbiote to mutter irritably. I stopped eating flesh meat, an easy sacrifice to make, as I had never been fond of it, perhaps a sign of things to come.  
My need for sleep seemed to diminish, not that I had been somnolent before. This made the matter of tracking one-time donors much simpler.  
In order to better understand the phage, I elected to undergo an MRI, one of the newly introduced internal imaging systems coming into use. I underwent a simple brain scan as a control, then underwent a scan with the phage alert in my head. The second scan revealed considerably more activity, particularly in the centers of the brain associated with appetite, pleasure and aggression, as well as regions associated with respiration. This explained why, if I went too long without feeding that my sinuses became inflamed and if I continued to hold off on feeding, that I suffered mild asthma attacks.  
I had always been rather cool-blooded, but I noticed that my blood temperature slipped even lower, not perilously low, but enough that I tended to wear long sleeved shirts except on the most hideously hot days of summer.  
But perhaps the most jarring phenomena, the one thing for which I could find no scientific explanation, something which Sakaki had pointed out to me, was this: when the phage awakens, when its will and mine are as one, my glass eye seems to glow on its own. I could find no explanation for this except from a metaphysical angle: there are legends that vampires can cause light and shadow to bend in strange ways. Thus, if my behavior should grow suddenly more excited and if my glass eye should start to glow with a bluish light, I recommend that anyone near me should back away slowly and step out of my line of sight before fleeing. I am, after all, a predator and running from me will only set me in pursuit. Normally, I can keep my dark side in check, but every beast can slip its collar. But when the phage slips its collar, people are injured, even killed.

One phenomena I have never been able to explain is the matter of the red moon: I found that whenever the phage grew fully active, and particularly if I attacked someone, the face of the moon would turn blood red, as if a full lunar eclipse had taken place. I can offer no explanation for that, and so I set out to research any and every legend that I could find connecting the moon to energy feeders.

After some time, I found a plausible explanation, and it might explain the origins of my kind:

According to the apocryphal Book of Enoch, a book of the Judeo-Christian Old Testament which the Catholic Church had had removed due to some Byzantine matter of interpretation, there was, ages ago, a company of angels known as the Grigori or the Watcher angels.

One of their number, by the name of Sariel, is said to have been the master of the cycles of the moon, who also taught the arts of medicine and magic to the human race. Some texts describe the Grigori as being taller than most mortals, with silvery hair and pale faces set with silver or crimson eyes. These angels who turned their backs on the cool pleasures of heaven and gave themselves to the humans who had fallen for them, fathered sons and daughters as beautiful as their celestial sires.

As soon as I read this, I had to put the book down and let myself pace the room, taking this all in. My mother matched the description of the Grigori, and I resembled her.

Was it so? Was I truly a descendant of these dark angels? Was the phage within me a sign that I was a Nephillim?

I could find no more plausible explanation: the blood of angels might beat in my veins, and the hunger within me might be a result of the combination of bloodlines.

Changes continued taking place in my body. I shot up six whole inches in the space of three months and my shoulders and chest broadened, this to the despair of my tailor, who was hard put trying to alter my suits fast enough. There were times when I grew between the time that he made the fittings and completed the alteration.

I won’t say that my eyesight improved, but it has stopped deteriorating over time, as part of the aging process. I am forty as I write this, and yet I have the health and vigor of a man in his twenties. Yearly physical examinations including stress tests prove this: the cardiologist who oversees this is surprised, given the fact that I still smoke a half a pack of cigarettes a day. “Whatever else that you’re doing, Kazutaka, keep doing it,” he tells me. And this vote of confidence gives my inner self reason to purr and tell me that I chose rightly when I accepted its terms.

I was feeding almost nightly during this time. The hunger within had not abated, yet it had grown more manageable; but it came now with a voice in my head, the same that had spoken to me out of the depths of my near-death, commenting on the people around me, pointing out possible marks, gleefully describing what I could do with them. Initially, I considered calling on the services of prostitutes in the more discreet districts of Tokyo, but I knew that the fees would pile up in time and my accountant would grow suspicious.

I started to “nibble” on the pain of my patients, enough to reduce some of their sufferings; unfortunately, the phage seemed to find this especially delightful. It would appear that the old saw “you are what you eat” takes a literal bend with phages, and the pain I had felt around me during my youth had caused it to adapt to preferring pain as its source of sustenance. Thus, I resorted to this tactic only as I needed to, only when I had no other recourse.

The rest of the time, when I had the nights to spare, I slipped out to various underground clubs, usually gothic-themed places, where few would find my nature suspicious. Sure enough, I found a steady stream of eager young folk of either sex, willing to enjoy my embrace. Many were mere thrill-seekers, but others were more in earnest.

This was the early 1990s: the dot-com boom was in high gear and people were living large, as the phrase goes. I presented myself as a subtly flamboyant individual, drawing attention to myself without sacrificing my dignity. I was the mysterious, aloof gentleman in white, observing the hordes coolly from a table in the VIP balcony, tapping a waiter to offer drinks to a select young person, eventually inviting them to join me at my table.

It usually did not take long for them to agree to accompany me to a room in a love hotel, a polite version of the “no tell hotels” found in some American towns. (Given how small many homes and apartments can be in Japan, it isn’t always possible for a young man to bring home a date for an hour or a night of intimacy, and so love hotels help provide them with the privacy they need and the ambience they want).

I left my partner of the evening sated yet drained close to their core, yet not too close. I would carefully block their memories, so that they could recall only a dim memory of a large, slim, graceful shape that had brought them to the heights of pleasure and plunged them into the depths of sin.

But there came the nagging desire to take a life to sustain my own. I tried killing animals, but I could not bear to do it. Nor did it sustain me with the nourishment that I needed. I have never been able to willfully harm an animal without it leaving me shaken, and if anything, they brought me comfort. They were innocents, unlike the humans about me.

The nascent gothic sub-culture which had reached my country attracted me, perhaps because the young folk who took part in it were unafraid to look the dark side of life and find a weird beauty in it, and perhaps because I had seen so much darkness in my life. These young folk with their dark colored garments and romantic styles also seemed more accepting of what I had realized were my kind: I could move freely among them, taking what I needed or accepting what was offered.

I should add that I was generally discriminating in selecting donors. I rarely announced it, but I would allude to it as a way of testing the waters, and if they understood it with clear eyes, all the better. I generally avoided those who regarded vampirism with an excessively morbid fascination. To me, while I was a creature of the darkness, living on the edge of humanity with peculiar needs that had to be met, I was no “darke chylde of thee nyghte”, or however they chose to abuse their words. But there were times when I could not find a more rational casual donor, and so I gritted my teeth and played into their fantasies. In time, I grew past my own inhibitions, and while I preferred the reasonable ones, I wasn’t above having my fun with what might be called a “fang-fan”.

But I did try to avoid certain kinds: if a person was clearly under the influence of drink or drugs, I would not engage them, mostly because the effects of the chemicals in their system could transfer to mine during the course of a feeding, and in order to keep the phage under control, I had to keep a clear head. I also tried to avoid the mentally unhinged, as sweet as their madness might taste.

In the middle of all this, and even with Hasagawa in prison for trying to kill me, the Hasagawas chose to file a malpractice suit against me. This was financially suicidal for him, as I had more resources and with the kind of solicitors that I had working for me and for the clinic, as well as the general social climate toward lawsuits in our country, I was able to stall it. I was not about to take this on the back, and the justice system was working too slowly for my tastes.

This was a diversion for another card that I was about to put into play.

I had grown more proficient at dream walking and the phage had told me that the best way to eliminate the lawsuit was to eliminate the claimant. I hesitated, but to do what it urged was the quickest way to resolve the mess.

And so I let my double-spirit roam, stalking Hasagawa's spirit. I traced his spirit to his prison cell, finding him asleep. A perfect situation: I stood over him like a hawk, diving into his dreams.

He dreamt of walking along a darkened street of a nameless city, clearly symbolic of the dark path that he had chosen when he attacked me. I inserted myself into the landscape, unseen but putting out a palpable aura. His dream-self startled and turned to flee, trying to evade the unseen monster dogging his very heels. I caught up with him, knocking him down before feeding on his spirit.

The next morning, I awakened late: feeding on the very core of a person's energy always left me like a predator that had gorged itself on the flesh of its kill. But Sakaki stood at my bedside, with the news that Hasagawa had suffered what appeared to be a massive stroke and had died in his sleep.

Ironic that I was under the influence of the phage when I killed the man who tried to kill me, while he himself was under the influence of alcohol at the time. Justice had been rendered, but the problem in some ways had worsened.


	3. Full Moon: Man and Monster

The Hasagawa civil suit was deadlocked. Hasagawa’s widow, following her husband’s wishes, intended to see that I never practiced medicine again, despite the fact that the medical board ruling that I had done nothing criminally negligent. They had reviewed me as a surgeon and found that, despite my lack of an eye, I could continue performing surgeries. My only restriction was that I had to remove my glass eye before a procedure.

The voice within me kept urging me to consider Mrs. Hasagawa as our next victim. I thought her too obvious, but my demon insisted: destroying her would put an end to the legal battle, No claimant, no case.  
I retired to a small cottage near the town of Kamakura, a village that looked as though it had barely changed since the Edo period. Local legends abounded regarding the village and the gods which dwelt in the river that ran through it. I had an ulterior motive in choosing this village. Mrs. Hasagawa had retired to this village in order to regroup after her husband’s sudden passing.

I kept a discreet eye on her comings and goings, even tracking her to a small teahouse. One night, I put in an appearance there, offering my condolences and intending to pay for her meal. She refused the latter offer, but she accepted the former and even forbore to listen to my side of the case.

I reminded her that I was as much a victim, in a different way: I had tried to save her son’s life, and I had done all that was medically possible. I told her that if I could have raised her son from the dead, that I would have done so, but I was a man of science, not a priest.

Her sympathies came around, thanks in no small part to the slight compulsion I had used on her. She accepted my case, yet she admitted, she could not yet forgive me for what had happened. My inner demon snerked at this, for it had expected as much. I ignored it. For now.

We parted, but I veiled and followed her to a house whose grounds backed up onto an orchard of flowering cherry trees. The full moon rode high in the sky over the blooming trees, the blossoms filling the air with their scent and their falling petals. I saw her walking in the orchard and so I unveiled and gave in to the darkness within, letting the demon use my limbs and my senses.

I approached her, walking softly though not stealthily, masking my intent. She must have heard me, for she turned toward me, surprised to see me. I explained that I was staying in a house nearby and so I had taken a short cut through the orchard.

“Do you know how it is that cherry trees came to pink?” I asked.

“No, I do not,” she replied.

“The first flowering cherry tree witnessed a brutal murder, a lover’s quarrel gone horribly wrong, a jealous man stabbing his mistress in the shadow of the tree. And so, when the woman’s body collapsed on the roots, they accepted her gently, her blood sinking into the ground. The tree drank up that blood, which spread into the blossoms, coloring them,” I said, taking her by the arm and turning her to face me. A look of dismay crossed her face. Even as the moon went behind a cloud, I saw my face reflected in her eyes. She had ever reason to be terrified.

My hand went for the switchblade which I carried in a deep pocket of my topcoat. I whipped out the knife, unsheathing the blade. I raised it, gripping her arm so hard that the circulation stopped under my grip,

The cloud overhead broke and the moonlight fell over us, bathing us in red light. Only then did I sheathe the blade again, in the pit of her throat. She gasped, coughed, choking on the blood that pulsed up from her throat. She flailed at me with her free arm, her movements weakening. She sagged against me, and I let her drop, letting her blood fall on the roots of the cherry tree. There was not much lifeforce in her. I felt her life flow into me, but it barely wet the inside of my mouth, as it were. Mere carbohydrates that I would soon burn off when I needed protein.

A branch rustled behind me. Did I have a witness? I turned, intending to eliminate the intruder. A slender form in a green yukata stepped out from under a cherry tree, a girl, perhaps sixteen year old.I could feel the youngster’s life force, even then, at that distance: potent, rich, its scent full-bodied, like a fine wine. I rushed at her and wrestled her to the ground. She went down easily, but not without a struggle. She screamed and her cry was deeper-toned than I expected. Pinning her with knees and elbows, I covered her mouth with one hand as my free hand went to her sash.

Once I opened her thin yukata, I found that she was a he, a young man just past puberty. By that time, I was a mere passenger in my own head, my dark half in full control of my faculties. And the darkness knew nothing of propriety or legalities. Sex or violence were its primary modes of feeding, and if it could conflate the two somehow, all the better.

I had learned, perhaps too quickly, to dissociate when the phage took possession of its prey. As my body and the phage mounted the youth, I found myself taking a clinical view: Tanner’s Stage four, not quite fully mature, but very well-developed for his age. Even as I stroked the youth’s shaft into erection, even as I slid my mouth over it, I quivered within. I had no other recourse, I was as much at the mercy of the phage as the youngster beneath me.

The youth screamed as his body spent itself into my mouth. At some point, I slung the youth’s ankles over my shoulders and took full advantage of his slender thighs, till I spent myself on his lean belly. I leaned over him to lick up my seed -- I am a tidy monster -- and as sated as I was, I wanted more. I wanted every drop of his life, but in this one, it was very strong. He had spent years training himself, so that mind and body were as one. And so I decided to forge a link between us.

I reached into the youth’s soul and placed my mark on it: the kanji for “red moon”. He did not fight me, too drained to object. I thought perhaps this would be the end of him, but his spirit energy welled up again, like water from a bottomless spring. This one would survive the ordeal, and so I reached into his mind and using a thread of my own energy, I encompassed his memory of this night and sealed it away. Like a star that comes into the vicinity of a black hole, his energy would drain into me, continuing to nourish me as I continued to feed from him, till at last he could no longer sustain himself and he died.

I cast him into a deep sleep, and I laid him down under the cherry tree, closing his robe over his body, then kissing his brow before I rose and returned to my lodgings.

I slept the sleep of the sated that night, not rising till noon. I had given Sakaki the order that I was not to be disturbed, but even still, the local police knocked on my door, and I had to respond.

They asked me the usual questions, if I had heard or seen anything on the previous night. I replied that I had not, that I had turned in early due to my continued convalescence. Not a total fabrication: I had not been in possession of my own mind and body for most of the night. They took down my answers and informed me that if they had any further questions, that they would call me.

I heard nothing further. I had been careful not to leave any DNA evidence, so there was no way to trace the crime to me. The case went cold and the malpractice suit was dropped for lack of someone to pursue it, and I returned to my practice.

Proof that fate is not lacking a sense of irony, two years later, a man named Kurosaki came to the clinic, bringing his fifteen year old son who had developed a strange illness that had left the boy weak and exhausted. I sensed the boy well before I entered the examination room where one of my colleagues was handling his intake. The youngster narrowed his eyes at me, trying to place my face, but the seal that I had placed on his memory of that night was solid: he would not remember me.

No name could be placed on the youth’s illness. In a bid to conceal the matter in plain sight, I suggested that a predatory spirit might be draining the boy’s spirit energy. But traditional man that he was, Kurosaki was skeptical.

In the end, the only name that we could put to the boy’s condition was “a wasting disease”. We treated him as best as we could, but in the end, the boy went home to the family estate to die.

I knew the night that the boy died: I awoke from a sound sleep in my apartment in the city, my bedroom bathed in crimson moonlight. I felt the thread that had bound us severed, drawn taut until it broke as he crossed over into the afterlife, but I did not sense my end of it fade away, a sure sign that a trace of it remained in his spirit, wherever it had gone.

I would miss the constant flow of energy: I had not had to seek out a donor in all that time, but now the phage was whispering that the time would come that I would need to find another life to offer to it.

But the proverbial opportunity of a lifetime would soon present itself.

Satomi called me to Kyoto unexpectedly, telling me that there was one more portion of my inheritance that he had to turn over to me.

"Muraki-san, it's your brother," he told me, as he was sat in his office in Shion University's Frontier Medicine branch.

I stared at the man as if he had gone mad. "Unless the boy was some immortal being, that can't be possible. I saw one of the family servants shoot him. His body fell into my arms."

Satomi shook his head. "No, he's nothing like that. He survived the shot in the back, but he was in a vegetative state for years. Your grandfather had appointed me his guardian, since the boy's mother would have nothing to do with him because of her relationship with your father.

"There's one problem, though: your grandfather signed off on harvesting the boy's organs and, you see, I've been running some experiments in sustaining the central nervous system on artificial life support."

My brain conjured the image of a brain in a vat of nutrient solution, and the phage chortled at the notion. "I shall have to see this," I told him.

Satomi lead me out of the office and down to a sub-sub-basement lab, which at one time had been a military laboratory that my grandfather had used during the war. In a room sealed with a blast door with several locks, he revealed what had happened to my half-brother.

A glass tank stood at the back of the cold room, the greenish light of the flourescent tubes on the ceiling casting it in a half-light. But a light came up in the tank, lighting up a spine and a head attached, floating in a bath of fluids, its medium-brown hair fanned about the face, like seaweed. Metallic tubes had been grafted into the neck and spine, linking it to a heart-lung machine behind the tank.

The eyes hung half-open, but the eyes themselves stared forward, unmoving, the greenish-hazel color of the irises unmistakable.

"He regains consciousness from time to time, but most of the time, he's in a coma-like state," Satomi explained.

I ran a hand over the glass, gazing at the face of the monster that had plagued me for over a year, the face that haunted my memories and nightmares till I had learned to gain control of the dream world.

This was perfect. My bete-noire had fallen low, reduced to a mere head in a vat. The phage screamed with delight, hinting at what we could do to the one who had broken my soul and destroyed my family. My better judgement cringed at the idea, but the part of me that served as an acolyte to the dark god within got the upper hand.

My worst enemy had not slipped through my fingers, but rather, he had become a new challenge. I had to find some means of piecing him back together, either from cadavers like some Victor Frankenstein or from donor tissue. Then, when he was restored, it would be my turn to harm him, to make his soul cry out for a mercy that never came.

"So, shall I have the life support system shut down?" Satomi asked.

"No, not immediately," I replied. "I need time to think this through. He is the only living family that have left."

Satomi was working in clone research, trying to grow replacement organs from human tissue so that donations from the living or clinically deceased would no longer be needed. This gave me the oppurtunity to string him along for several years: I paid part of the fees to maintain the life support, something that fell under the normal opeating budget of the university lab, the better to keep it out of sight from the officials.

I never voiced a word of my true motives to him, not until the night when he outlived his usefulness and I had to end our partnership, one night in October of 2000, at the gateway to the millenium.

But I had other things to occupy my time: Tsubaki Kakyouin's condition had not improve: the hole in her heart, proved more involved than previous x-rays and scans had revealed; there was a tissue deficit, meaning that I could not simply stitch up the back of her heart. A transplant was the only way that her condition and quality of life could improve. But that brought us up short: transplants are frowned upon in Japan, due to the Buddhist influence in the country. I would have to bring Tsubaki off shore if I was to perform the procedure to save her life.

I told Kakyouin the bad news. He grew distraught, telling me he would do anything, that he would pay any price to save his daughter's life.

"Any price?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Anything you name, Doctor," he said, hands held up, helplessly.

"We shall have to take her into international territory," I said. I knew that he was having a ship refit as a combination passenger ship and light cargo ship. "What of that ship that you are refitting? I think we can use part of that as a floating clinic. But there is the matter of finding a donor." Tsubaki was Japanese on her father's side and Chinese on her mother's, and there was one place out of the country where I could find a high number of people with that genetic make-up: Hong Kong, one of the cities to which Kakyouin's ships sailed often.

I started to research sources of potential unwitting donors. I located several homes for destitute young women that had residents of mixed ancestry. They would be less likely to be missed. The prevailing superstition caused people to shy from donating: the popular supersitions made organ donation, even donating blood, prone to misinformation. People thought that if they received donated tissue that some part of the person's spirit would attach itself to the donor tissue and that spirit would harm the recipient out of anger.

At length, the retrofitting of the ship was complete and a lab installed in a corner of the hold, where no one would find it or distract me. The ship was rechristened "the Queen Camelia", in honor of Tsubaki, who would be making her home there. Her name also translated to 'camellia', and she was fond of wearing the flowers in her hair or on the bodice of her dresses. I had even affectionately compared her to the heroine of the Dumas novel, "Camille".

Through Oriya Mibu, I had connections with the Yakuza, the Japanese answer to the Mafia, and so I used those connections to find assistance in Hong Kong, arranging for the kidnappings of the potential donors. Of course I had to hide the evidence when I found one whose genetics did not completely match Tsubaki's. Kakyouin averted his eyes from what I was doing. Nobody on the medical board suspected what I had put into motion. Kakyouin was wealthy and doted on his daughter, and so it should come as no surprise that he would hire a private physician. On the surface, it all looked proper.

And then a perfect match presented itself: Kakyouin had hired a girl named Eileen to serve as Tsubaki's companion and as a dealer in the casino on board the Queen Camelia. The girl had worked as a flower seller, a street gamine a few years Tsubaki's elder, with no family to speak of. The only one who would miss her would be Tsubaki, but in a way, her friend would not be far from her.

I found a pretext for sending Eileen ashore when we docked in Hong Kong: it was Chinese New Year and we would need supplies for the festivities.

Instead, she fell in with the thugs I had hired, who dragged her back on board and down to the lab, where I set to work with the necessary tests, keeping the girl drugged and restrained.

The match was perfect, as if fate had sent Eileen to be Tsubaki's healing angel. I told Kakyouin I had found Tsubaki a heart. I performed the transplant that night, putting Tsubaki on the road to recovery. The procedure was a relief to both, particularly Kakyouin, who wanted nothing more to do with my work and what he knew of it.

I had arranged a certain amount of "insurance", in case Kakyouin turned on me: I knew of some dealers in organs, to who I supplied parts from the failed matches. Since I didn't need any of the money it produced, I arranged to have it appear that Kakyouin was partaking in this traffic: In the event that he tried to have me prosecuted for kidnapping and organ theft, I had made sure to redirect the cash to one of Kakyouin's offshore accounts.

I added genetics to my disciplines, reading everything that I could find. My condition could not happen in a vacuum: it had to have some natural source, a time bomb hidden within my cells. Perhaps science could not answer everything about me, but it could explain some aspects.

The first chance that I got to analyze my own DNA, I took it, comparing a sample of my own current tissue to a sample from a lock of my hair that had been saved from my childhood, at my first haircut at the age of three.

Sure enough, anomalies appeared across several chromosomes in both samples, but the newer sample contained more unidentified markers. I was evolving, changing into something more.

I made this analysis an annual event and as I suspected, the changes continued to occur as long as I kept feeding off energy.

I had Satomi sworn to silence on this, and considering what I knew about various extra-curricular activities, he wasn’t in a position to question our arrangement.

I feared being unmasked as something more than human. The nightmare image of being locked away as a madman, or vivisected as a strange specimen filled me with dread. To be stripped of my credentials, my property and my name, then locked away in some facility -- the spectre of dread lurked in my mind and left me sleepless at night. That is why I wiped the minds of my casual donors, in case they recognized me and my actions came to the attention of the authorities.

Ironically, I was the kind of subject which my grandfather kept in his clinic for further observation. Perhaps, if he had sensed this in me, this is why he doted on me as a way to ease his conscience.

Decker had warned me that given my troubled past, I ran the risk of seeing my inner spirit emerge as a demon: there had to be a explanation for this and my best theory was that the traumas in my life had triggered the time bombs built into my genetics. Just as certain diseases seem linked to time bombs in the patient’s DNA, which when the conditions in the body were right, caused a malfunction, resulting in disease, so it could have happened in a preternatural way. The abuse that my mother and half-brother inflicted, the attempt that Saki made on my life, and the near-murder were the three hammer strokes that broke the cage holding back the demon. The influx of painful, negative energy had caused the entity to darken and harden into the beast which it emerged as, a preternatural version of “you are what you eat”.

And I had agreed to this Jekyll and Hyde existence, though I lacked the luxury of transforming into a twisted monster when my demon came to the surface of my mind. A moment of desperation led me to comply with great and terrible danger which lay within, something which I would not have given into, if I had confronted it in any other circumstances.

Seeing this, all the revenge plans I had dreamt of in the dark of my room, all the horrible things I wanted to inflict on Saki, for what he had done to me and to my family, all that came rushing back, I wanted to be the one standing over Saki, in dark exultation while he lay sprawled helpless at my feet. I wanted to be the one leaning over him, fingering him and saying, “I might have enjoyed that, if you hadn’t turned that pleasure into a nightmare.”

There had to be some way to restore Saki, some way to rebuild his body. I found myself again agreeing to assist Satomi in his endeavors. I told him nothing about my intentions, but I told him that I was quite willing to assist him, however he needed me. He was only too willing to accept my offer: his standing in the science community had fallen, due no doubt to how he had handled the matter of tending to Saki. He had always been viewed askance by his peers, but now he had been relegated to the level of a modern Viktor Frankenstein. However, since I was taking the superior position in the relationship, I exacted from him the same fee he had once charged me. He still darted the same furtive glances he had when I was his student, when he thought I could not see. And so I took to creeping into his dreams, but when I awakened in the morning, I wondered how long I could continue listening to the suggestions of my shadow side, before it won out and I, the host, was reduced to a shadow.

After I analyzed my own DNA, the thought crossed my mind to analyze a sample from a swatch of hair that I had found in the file of my grandfather’s violet-eyed patient. On comparing his genetics and mine, I found markers that were almost identical. The match did not come close enough to make us blood relatives, but we shared an ancestor. Even some of the markers that I could put no name to turned up in the patient’s DNA, as if we had the same preternatural heritage.

Now I wanted to find him even more, the better to find out what he was and what I am.

A warlock does not advertise, but word gets around if someone is gifted in certain arts. Other practitioners will drop hints as to who might be able to cast a certain kind of spell, if they cannot provide it to someone who approaches them. Which is how I met Maria Wong.

The girl was an internationally-known pop singer from China. Her stepmother Mei Rin, who was also her manager, came to my office, begging me to come to Shanghai is quickly as I could: her daughter had recently taken her life, there were contracts left outstanding, and she had heard things about me…

I tested her: I told her that I was a surgeon, not a miracle worker. The woman stood her ground, promising me a third of Maria’s record sales and part of their take from her concerts, in exchange for resurrecting her. I hardly needed the money: despite the way that the Japanese market had fallen apart, my stocks were doing well. But the challenge struck me as a welcome opportunity to flex my abilities. And the phage whispered that the girl could serve as a proxy feeder, a link with her soul and mine would allow her to hunt for me and free me up.

I agreed to assist Mei Rin and I traveled with her to Shanghai. The girl had been buried for a day, but Mei Rin had planned ahead, having the girl’s body embalmed, and so she was still fresh enough that the ritual might work.

That night, as the moon rose, I set up the ritual circle about the grave, then closing the circle before digging into the earth and breaking open the seals on the coffin. I chanted the spells over her, a combination of a Voudon spell meant to awaken a corpse and a spell meant to summon a departed soul.

With my body serving as a conduit, I breathed life back into her, laying myself over the young woman’s body full length.

For a moment, she did not stir, then she drew in a breath and her eyelids fluttered open. Her first reaction was a sob, clearly of dismay at being awakened. I rose to my feet and looked down into her face, reassuring her that all would be well if she did as I told her.

The link between her mind and soul with her body was tenuous and the strings of her will easy to pull. I had started to use compulsions, but she was particularly susceptible to them, no doubt a result of losing the will to live she had suffered before taking her life into her own hands.

I had to keep a close watch on her, but fortunately, I had a clear space on my calendar. The Nagasaki Music Festival was coming up in a few weeks and Maria had been booked as their guest of honor. The Queen Camellia was making a return journey to Hakata and I convinced Kakyouin to book Maria to sing in the casino on board the ship.

The steerage provided a testing ground for her; fortunately, Kakyouin turned a blind eye to what went on: he knew better than to question the demon who had cured his daughter, or to object to what kind of pets that he kept.

I tracked Maria’s movements discreetly, following her while I was veiled, using the link between us as a means to pull the strings of her will, training her to hunt. She had to learn to acclimate to her new life, if she was to survive at all.

But the link worked only one way, from myself to her and that blocked the energy flow. Until she was accustomed to hunting, until she could serve me much in the way that Renfield served Dracula, I would have to resort to intimate means to collect from the girl. Mei Rin hardly cared what I did with the girl, as long as my spells kept her alive. Thus by night, Maria served as my consort.

However, Maria often slipped out of her complacent state, sometimes in the midst of an embrace and attacked me. I generally let her, taking her blows as eagerly as I took her caresses. I even laughed at the absurdity of the situation, till I managed to calm her down, soothing her by words and by gentle compulsions, till she eased back into her complicit tranquility.

But from time to time, she slipped her collar and her suicidal tendencies returned. We had to keep sharp objects out of her sight, but that hardly stopped her from breaking mirrors or drinking glasses and trying to cut her throat with the shards. The despair and anger that she exuded me, but I could not allow her to kill herself: the experiment was still very much in progress.

I kept an open mental link between myself and the girl at all times, allowing me to follow her every movement. If she had an odd moment of free time, either between rehearsals or costume fittings, or the hundred and one other things that fill the schedule of a popular singer, I would pull on her chain and set her to hunting the prey that we both needed.

On one such occasion, I had stopped into the cathedral in the city to rest and reorder my own energy.

It likely sounds odd, a vampire on holy ground. But I have found the energy in churches and cemetaries soothes my nerves and keeps me settled. The energy generated by the prayers and collected within the walls of a church has a calming effect and for a time, it quiets the phage. I may not believe in God and my own conscience does not function as it once did, but when I am alone in a church, for a moment, I feel as I did before my awakening.

Times like this, for a moment, I thought back on what I has become, and what had lead me to this state, and so at that moment, the part of my core that remained human ached with sorrow to the point that I could not hold back the tears that came to my undamaged eye.

Even then, I still had to keep a hold on Maria's leash: she had gone hunting and I had to see that she was discreet about it, that she did not call attention to either of us.

But still, someone came running into the church, pausing to ask if I had seen a girl matching Maria's description.

I rose from my meditations and turned to face the intruder.

And I gazed upon the face that had haunted me since I had first seen its image, the face of the violet-eyed patient who had taken his life so many years ago, still as beautiful in his afterlife as it was in his mortal life.

All my longing, all my thoughts toward him, all my yearning lead up to this moment, this singular point in time when I gazed into those violet eyes. I wanted to sink at his feet and weep tears of relief, just as much as I wanted to seize him by the shoulders, pin him to the altar and ravage him, feeding on him in the most unholy communion imaginable. And just as much as I wanted to nestle my face into his neck tenderly. I wanted him to moan beneath me, either from pain or from pleasure or from some combination of the two.

Binding Maria Wong’s soul to her body had been a dry run for something larger, and now another chess piece had moved into play. The young man with the violet eyes had unwittingly nudged it into play, and he too would become a part of the match. If I could isolate what made him heal so quickly, I could replicate it and bestow it on Ukyou. And on the one who had destroyed who had destroyed my family and pushed me toward the darkness.

((Editor's Note: The manuscript ends here))


End file.
